BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Semantic search is now becoming a regular track at many search conferences.  I’ll be a panelist along with Yahoo, Microsoft/Powerset, TextDigger & Cognition to discuss new trends in search technologies at SES in Chicago next month.

Search engines have put major thrust on leveraging capabilities from semantic technologies to increase search relevance. This session discusses the various approaches taken by semantic companies and how they integrate with mainstream search to offer better customer experience.  Discussion will include natural language search versus vertically focused semantic search, meta data strategies and how each approach uniquely addresses relevance, long tail queries and local search opportunities.

The semantic search panel is at 4:30PM on Monday, December 8th 2008.  If you are attending SES in Chicago, please join me and other speakers for this session about next generation of search. See you there!

We are excited about making it to ReadWriteWeb’s annual top 10 list of Semantic applications to watch. There are some terrific companies pioneering the areas of natural language processing and semantic technology, and we are very happy to see the technology influence consumers in every day applications - such as restaurant search. Here’s the conclusion from the article -

“The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round. “

Many thanks to ReadWriteWeb and for increasing number of consumers who are providing invaluable feedback on our web & phone applications.

We have also been selected to Mashable’s list of nominees for Open Web Awards for 2008. BooRah is nominated in the “Search and Social Search” category. Please continue to support us by casting your vote for BooRah below.

We are excited to announce  a partnership with infoUSA (NASDAQ:IUSA)  to provide enhanced content to the Mobile, Navigation and Local Search Markets.  infoUSA is the leading provider of proprietary business and consumer databases, local business listings for directories, and  POIs for navigation systems.

BooRah’s unique ratings and summaries offer a simple and convenient way for consumers to evaluate what’s good and bad about a local restaurant. The ratings and other meta information are generated  by our patent pending semantic technology platform which extracts and tabulates sentiments from user reviews.

This partnership allows us to work with infoUSA’s customers and offer our proprietary ratings and reviews in a format  ideal for mobile, navigation and online directory applications.  Further, we have developed a simple integration procedure with infoUSA’s data to ensure easy and accurate enhancement to the data for their customers.

Last week Google launch Android Market, the platform for developers to upload their applications to the T-Mobile G1 phone. We launched our restaurant search application into the Android Market, along with apps by 100’s of other developers.

After a week of settling down, we are pretty happy to find ourselves at the top of Lifestyle Category with about 20,000 downloads, 3.5 stars and  100+ ratings*. I’ve been analyzing our data since yesterday and have found some interesting aspects to share.

 Geo-location & Searches

As expected, 3G coverage areas within T-Mobile network generated the most number of downloads. Here’s a map that we used to plot all the initial coordinates when phones downloaded our restaurant search application.

Thanks to Clusterer application which helped us map 10,000’s of coordinates on google maps to create this view.

The attached table  shows the number of unique locations where users performed searches for local restaurants. These do not include searches by cuisine, keyword or location separately.

Downloads & Usage

Android Market continues to grow steadily, and we are seeing similar trends for our application. We are also pleasantly surprised by the number of reviews we have received from the phone compared to our website and consumers seem to find it very convenient to write a brief review while at the restaurant.

User Feedback & Issues

One of the biggest complaints we’ve received is on missing or closed restaurants.   We’ve added user functionality to flag closed restaurants, and we plan to add a way for users to add new or missing restaurants – as well as working with new and existing sources to track down the latest restaurant information. Restaurants is one of the hardest hit industries due to the down economy and the convenience of updating such information is critical to managing it. We have received over 1000 updates on restaurants since launch. The street view that we’ve integrated into restaurant details also has raised some interesting questions about the accuracy of Google’s Street View data. The map coordinates seem to be accurate but the street view shows adjacent block view. Android also provides an easy way for users to communicate with the developers directly and we’ve received many emails with feedback and feature requests.

We are thrilled with the early success of Android  platform and hope to release consumer requested features as soon as possible.

If you have an e-mail account with Google, Yahoo!, or AOL, you have an OpenID.

With the largest e-mail providers now compliant with OpenID, most Internet users can now benefit from the OpenID movement.  So, go on and sign in to BooRah without having to create a BooRah password.