BooRah - Inside the Buzz

We’ve talked on this blog about how restaurants can benefit from engaging (or at least understanding) their customers’ conversations about them on the Internet.  Now, BooRah is launching a new service for restaurant owners, marketers, and consultants that helps them manage these conversations — the service is a comprehensive “reputation tracking” report that pulls together these reviews on a restaurant into one place.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes about the service and some restaurant owner perspectives here:

“More and more, people are using user-generated reviews to make decisions about where to eat,” Hemmeter [Founder & CEO of E&O Trading Co.] said. “You have people who write fictitious things because they couldn’t get a table. And then you have people who write because they had a genuinely nice experience. All restaurant operators have to figure out how to get in on this online trend.”

The BooRah restaurant reputation reporting service executes an extensive search of professional restaurant reviewers’ online columns and blogs as well as consumer review web sites, and generates a concise summary, or “Restaurant Reputation Report,” for the restaurant owner.  The report details top review sources, overall ratings, top sentiments among reviewers (both good and bad), tracks trends over the past six months, and summarizes overall percentage ratings for food, service and ambiance for the restaurant.  You can see a sample report here:

More information is coming soon. In the meantime, if you are a restaurant owner you can sign up for a free version of our review tracking service here www.BooRah.com/owner

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We’ve recently made a change to how we display restaurant search results on BooRah - we’ve always shown restaurants ranked by their ‘Buzz’ number, but what exactly does ‘Buzz’ mean?

Buzz is now calculated by adding up all the positive comments about a given restaurant across all reviews - with more “weight” given to the more strongly positive comments.  For example, if a reviewer writes “My waitress was very nice” that’s +3 Buzz.  “Tuna bolognese is also an exceptional dish” adds +5 to Buzz (”exceptional” is very strong).  And “Lovely atmosphere for a date night.” also adds +3 to Buzz.  However, “service was a bit slow” does not add to the Buzz count.  So, a restaurant like Masa (shown below) has had a total of 4,435 weighted-positive comments written about it.

When you search for a restaurant by city or by cuisine, we will show you the restaurants with the highest buzz (that serve the cuisine) first - helping you find the best restaurants in a city.

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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.

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.

We are pretty excited to announce the alpha launch of “Restaurant Search” application on T-Mobile G1.

Please see BooRah’s Android G1 webpage for instructions to download and also a demo video.

If you are browsing this page on a T-Mobile G1, the you can install our application by downloading it from here

You can see additional screen shots of our application on flickr here

We are still waiting to load our app on to the Android Marketplace which should make it simpler to install.

Here is a quick description of some of the features that may entice you to download our app and use it for restaurant search on the go.

• Viewable Map Area Search - You can zoom-in/zoom-out or drag the map to any area of the search and just hit the “Refresh” button and see top restaurants within that area. You can then filter the restaurants by using the search option to filter  by cuisine, menu item, name or any other keyword.
• Comprehensive Search - You can use the search option to find restaurants by city, zip, neighborhood, point of interest, street/cross street and your current location.
• List View  - The list view is a convenient way to browse all the restaurants quickly to see their cuisine, ratings, reviews and other relevant information. You can easily tab navigate back and forth between the map and list views.
• Detail View - Each restaurant is rated for  food, service, ambiance. We also show a brief summary of the reviews and a list of  top sentiments extracted from those reviews. From this view, you can
  • Call the restaurant directly
  • Get a street view of that restaurant to see the surroundings and neighborhood.
  • Write a review of the restaurant

As with any alpha release, we’re hoping you’ll let us know of any issues you come across; we’ll fix them as soon as possible.  If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment here.

[UPDATE] - GPS acquisition seems to be an issue in many areas, we’re configuring a few additional map settings to provide a graceful workaround.

The first Android-powered phone, the T-Mobile G1, is launching Wednesday. We’re releasing an alpha version of Restaurant Search Application for you to find the best restaurants on the road. Android is a slick platform and we’re excited to let consumers  experience BooRah on the phone using a native client. We had an opportunity to load our application on a G1 phone this weekend and here are a few screen shots:

List View of a set of restaurants based on Search

Ratings & Summaries for the selected restaurant

Map View showing top rated restaurants based on GPS

In testing the G1 phone for the first time,  it is exciting to see the power of a platform that could change the world of mobile computing. We plan to have our alpha version ready for you to download when the T-Mobile  launches this Wednesday. Await our next blog post on instructions to download the application.

We’re happy to announce the launch of our  free, location-enabled Web Services API for Web sites and businesses looking to offer online restaurant reviews and ratings to their visitors. This web search API augments our existing syndication platform which is used by multiple newspaper and local destination websites. The key features of BooRah’s Web Services API are:

• Restaurant Search – Search for top rated restaurants across the US by City, Zip, Neighborhood, Point of Interest, Address, Street/Cross-Street, and Geo-Coordinates
• Restaurant Ratings – Get detailed ratings for Food, Service and Ambiance
• Restaurant Features – Get links for Discounts, Menus, Coupons, Takeout and many other valuable features

We are thrilled with the developments in the area of location-based services and recent announcements by Mozilla’s Geode, Loki’s browser-plugin and Iphone/Android platforms. We believe that BooRah’s semantic technology is uniquely positioned to deliver necessary content for mobile applications. The release of this API is a first step in supporting development of location-enabled restaurant applications are we are eager to drive the adoption by enhancing based on requirements from the community.

Here is the link to access our Restaurant Search API documentation.

Kosmix.com, a popular Internet destination that organizes content by topics,  is already using our API to enable consumers to search for favorite local restaurants.

We look forward to engaging with the developers to drive the adoption of this platform and enhance it further. Please send any questions regarding the API to api@boorah.com