BooRah - Inside the Buzz

In the past few weeks we have gotten a lot of concrete feedback on areas for improvement/features on our website. We have deployed a new release with the following major features/enhancements:

a) Mobile Support: You can now search our entire database of restaurants on your phone using a very simple and easy to use interface. For most of the phones, if you select http://www.boorah.com, you’ll be automatically redirected to the mobile site. Where we cannot detect the user-agent for your phone, please enter our mobile restaurant search website (http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/m). The search results are exactly the same as you’d get on the Web and you’ll also see a simple summary of the restaurant in addition to our ratings for the restaurant. Mobile is where sentiment extraction and summarization are extremely valuable and this is our first release.

Here are a few examples of queries that may be highly relevant on phone:

Pizza in Mission, San Francisco

sushi in 94123

indian at El Camino and Castro, Mountain View

The search results are sorted similar to what you’d get on the web at boorah.com. The following screen shots are simple 2 level drill down to get the details and additional information.The summary and ratings are generated by our patent-pending summary and scoring system.

The following details screen shows number of reviews, overall popularity (expressed as %Rah) and a system generated summary.

PS: We’re adding support for maps and directions soon.

b)Navigational Enhancements between City and Metro Landing Pages - We have made our navigation between metro and city pages simpler( atleast we think so). The metro pages primarily provide navigational help in selecting a city. Also, if someone wishes to search across an entire area ( one might consider doing that for special dining occasions), we still support the “best of searches” across the entire metro area.

We’ve also incorporated a simple map to aid in selecting our coverage or drill down to cities that may not necessarily be listed at the top. We were able to find a very flexible, configurable and versatile map from backspace.com.

c) Search and Other Minor Enhancements - We’ve now incorporated a new full-text search engine in the backend which gives us a big boost on the performance and scalability. We are also making other tweaks to ranking algorithms to improve the overall relevance and search quality. We have also optimized content and spacing on pages.

Check out our new features and let us know your feedback.

Tags: BooRah, mobile search, restaurant search on phone

This entry was posted by Nagaraju Bandaru on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under BooRah, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.