BooRah - Inside the Buzz

There’s nothing like talking with a bunch of restaurant owners to gain a different perspective on the Internet. Sitting in an office on the Internet is about as far away from the realities of running a restaurant as you can get. With 50 or 100 hungry customers waiting to be served a nice meal and pay you in cash (or credit card) for it, where are you going to focus your attention?

An observant restaurant owner will learn a lot more about whether or not diners are enjoying his/her restaurant by watching them, or talking with them, than anything on the Internet will tell them. And certainly building your business and garnering the most positive-word-of-mouth starts with making your current customers ecstatic.

In this context then, it’s not surprising that some restaurant owners take offense to the “drive-by shooting” nature of online reviews — from their perspective, a lot of reviews are unjust, unfair, written only to gain social “status” on a review site, or even made-up slam pieces written by their competitors. What I’ve heard from restaurant owners is that they’d really like a way to engage WITH their customers better, not combat them in an anonymous fashion.

And restaurant owners are willing to reward these ongoing relationships and dialogs, with loyalty programs like Beach Chalet’s free dinner for two, Caprino’s free $25 gift certificate, to discounted offers like Oola’s.

What each of these restaurants knows is that building frequent, loyal customers — and rewarding those customers for their loyalty — is one of the best ways to build their businesses.

 Today announced launch of our service in 6 additional metropolitan areas. This brings our total metro count to 20. Since we started our geographical expansion in late Jan 2008, we have been adding a new metro area almost at the rate of 1/week. Here’s quick links to the top cities in the new metros: Restaurants in Detroit, Orlando Restaurants, Houston Restaurants, Austin Restaurants, Dallas Restaurants, and San Antonio Restaurants

We also announced a nationwide partnership with AmericanTowns.com, a network of community-based websites. Using our Javascript syndication platform, we are now powering restaurants search for 1000’s of cities on their website. E.g  Here’s a link on their website to san francisco restaurants

We are excited at the pace we are able to open up new markets and provide coverage at a national level in a short period.

Monday (04/21/2008) is Alternative Search Engines Day in San Francisco. Charles Knight and the good folks at ReadWriteWeb were kind enough to invite us to participate and share our perspective on NLP search. The sponsoring search engines for this invitation-only event are SeeqPod, UpTake, Matchpoint, HealthPricer, and GoPubMed.

See you there.

For most people who visit BooRah.com, they see a website with restaurants reviews, ratings and related information. Underneath the ratings and reviews is a platform that understands human sentiment and extracts subjective attributes from reviews and blogs across the Internet.

For a few hours yesterday, we had a great opportunity to meet and mingle with fellow technologists pioneering the world of semantic web. Powerset, hosted the inaugural semantic happy hour and metaweb, radar networks and trueknowledge attended the very informal but fun event. Powerset and TrueKnowledge previewed their search engines which are to be released in the coming weeks.

Above picture shows Mark Johnson (Powerset on the right) and Shrisha(BooRah on the left) and me (Nagaraju, BooRah) in the middle.

We had a great time at the happy hour and thoroughly enjoyed meeting peer pioneers in the world of semantic web. Thanks to Mark Johnson and Barney Pell for taking the initiative to host this and inviting us.

Next week, at the Alt Search Engines Meetup, I will also be on a panel with Barney and William on NLP search. See you there.

Last month, We announced the list of top restaurant bloggers which is compiled automatically by our semantic crawling platform. Simply put, it associates blog posts from various bloggers to specific restaurants and ranks the contributing bloggers. We are seeing great interest in our technology since launch and have gotten some very good feedback. Today, we are launching a feature that enables the contributing bloggers to claim their blog profile pages on BooRah and show case the ranking. Here are a couple of examples:

• Anna Haight of mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com
• Jo Boston of jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com

As we gather new blog posts and content from other bloggers, these rankings will dynamically change to reflect the latest ranking. We hope you will find this feature interesting and valuable to showcase your BooRah generated rankings. The process to claim your blogs is very simple. We’ll give you a piece of code that you can drop into your blog. To get started here’s a link to the list of all the top restaurant blogs. You can click on your blog and start the claim process. Here is the top 10 list currently, and you can use the link from here as a shortcut:

1. mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com - Anna Haight
2. ocmexfood.blogspot.com - ChristianZ
3. pleasurepalate.blogspot.com - pleasurepalate
4. foodandthings.blogspot.com - Food and Things
5. foodhoe.wordpress.com - foodhoe
6. kikimaraschino.blogspot.com - Kiki Maraschino
7. what2order.blogspot.com - kewlio
8. bestburgersfbay.blogspot.com - Scott Kline
9. jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com - Jo
10. foodieuniverse.blogspot.com - Foodie Universe

At this time, we do not have a easy search tool for other bloggers not listed in this list, but if you will leave a quick comment, we’ll get back to you with your rank and a link to claim your blog.

If you have other thoughts or comments, don’t hesitate to drop a note here.

CNN has an interesting post about restaurant etiquette.

Interesting tips and suggestions in the post are:

• Call restaurant if you’re more than 15 minutes late for reservation
• Tell hostess before sitting if you’re unhappy with table
• If service was bad, talk to management about automatic gratuity
• If you can’t eat entrees, make meal of hors d’oeuvres, side dishes

Check it out.

Last week was a big week for us. We announced the expansion of our restaurant reviews and rating service to 5 additional metro areas. With this announcement, we have now launched over 3000 cities and 225,000 restaurants in 15 metropolitan areas. Since we started our expansion plans early this year, we’ve been able to expand quickly, thanks to our maturing platform. So here’s our current progress - by the numbers:

• Since Late January, we launched 12 new metro areas, which is approximately 1 new metropolitan area/week
• Our restaurant service is now available across 3,000 cities in 16 different states.
• We have added about 500,000 reviews this year bring our total review count to 1,110,000+ reviews.
• In the San Francisco Bay Area, our first metro, we have reviews for 13,500 restaurants (65-70% of all restaurants in the metro area)
• Our review sources not only include popular review sites but also long tail content from bloggers and other influencers. Infact, we analyze over 100,000 blogs and extract reviews and posts dedicated to restaurants. The process of analyzing 1000’s of blog entries every day is completely automated and a result of our patent-pending semantic entity extraction system. See “Top Rated Restaurant Blogs” for more information.
• Our crawler extracts related attributes such as tags, cuisines, pictures, etc., We’ve also integrated with a few strategic partners to offer menus, reservations, takeouts and discounts. To date, we feature -
  • 45,000 Restaurant Menus
  • 35,000 Pictures for Restaurants
  • 4,000 Restaurants with Online Reservations
  • 8,500 Restaurant Discount Coupons and Offers
• Our NLP engine extracts “Boos” and “Rahs” from user reviews and has identified over 10 Million sentiments from the reviews todate. This meta data powers our summaries and ratings which you see on the website.

Today, we’re announcing the launch of our restaurant guide in Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami metropolitan areas. This brings the total number of metro areas covered to 15 and we are working on introducing our service to other parts of the country as well. Here are quick links for a couple these metro areas:

Restaurants in Washington DC - Baltimore Area
Restaurants in Philadelphia

In launching Las Vegas Restaurants, we encountered some interesting technical challenges in our crawling algorithm. It turns out, that most of the restaurants (atleast the popular ones) are located inside the hotels/casinos and do not have proper address and contact information in the yellow page listings. We had to tweak our entity-mapper to incorporate additional fuzzy heuristics. This will turn turn out to be very valuable in aggregating content for businesses that only have a PO Box or 1-800 telephone numbers as we expand to other categories.

We have also reached some significant milestones on the content side, a demonstration of the scalability of our semantic crawler and sentiment extraction platform. I’ll share additional details with some technical analysis today/tomorrow.