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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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

Location aware services are the wave of the future.  Built-in GPS chipsets & cell tower triangulation technologies have made Location Based Services (LBS) possible on smart-phones.  But, don’t underestimate your browser on your WiFi enabled laptop!  With technologies like Skyhook’s Loki and Mozilla Geode, you can inject location awareness into your everyday browser.

Today’s Techcrunch article reminded me that I hadn’t finished coding up a tiny Javascript bookmarklet that I had thought of a few months ago.  So, here it is: Your very own browser based location aware Restaurant Finder:

1. Install Loki browser plugin from their website
2. Drag this link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar: Find Restaurants Nearby
3. Restart your browser & then simply click the new bookmark you created

This should come in really handy for the business traveler arriving at a new hotel late at night who needs to find a place to eat, or when you’re looking for a nearby good place to eat after a convention or conference.

Last week, we launched a new website ( check out new site here). With this launch, not only do we cater to consumers who are looking for great dining recommendations but also to restaurants who are looking for equal footing in managing their reputation online.

We’ve created a new “Restaurant Dashboard” that allows the restaurants to track new reviews each week, get trends of reviews & ratings, and manage repeat diners. Participants of our loyalty program  get detailed reporting including  diner registrations, private reviews, survey results and other data.

About 3 months ago, we launched a “Customer Loyalty” program for restaurants. The main focus was to allow the restaurants to reward repeat diners for their loyalty while collecting private, but direct feedback on their experience. In talking with our restaurant customers in the past few days, it’s great to hear them say how much they love what we’re doing and how we are uniquely positioned to foster an ecosystem where consumers and restaurants participate alike.

For starters, here’s how BooRah helps restaurants manage their businesses - these are all FREE services

 Track Reviews - BooRah aggregates reviews from various review sites, blogs, and professional critics and generates a weekly summary report for the restaurant - this helps them track all the reviews about their restaurant at one place

Enhance Listing - A restaurant owner can claim their restaurant and manage information about the restaurant. One can upload pictures, provide links to a menu, add a brief description, or offer discounts to consumers

Useful Links & Blog -  Online Restaurant Marketing contains valuable information for restaurants and what they should be doing to build up awareness on the Internet.

The “Customer Loyalty” product  allows restaurants to track their loyal diners and reward them for their loyalty. Unlike other loyalty programs, where only the restaurant knows how many times a customer has dined at their restaurant, the DineTrak system  offers visibility to the diner and the restaurant as well. It not only tracks each dine event but captures valuable survey about their dining experience and written feedback.

All the survey data and feedback is visible only to the restaurant unless they explicity choose to make it public. Restaurants love to (as we would all) get feedback from actual diners and improve on their low-points without necessarily telling the world. Infact, the restaurants can directly reach out to the diners and extend their zone of influence.

Now here’s the most interesting by-product of this program -

Our core technology, the semantic engine,  generates ratings for food, service and ambiance from user reviews & blogs across the Internet. We have done multiple benchmarks against best rating sites and have proven that we are better or equal than those through use of technology alone. We now have an additional data point to benchmark our service against, survey results from actual diners. I’m glad to report that using the 2 months of data from surveys from loyalty program customers, our semantic rankings are completely inline with actual diner ratings. We’re very happy with the quality of the semantic results and ability to correlate them with actual diner feedback - something, that in the longer run, could be the underpinning of a consistent rating system across all local businesses.

We’re staging a new look for BooRah here. Over the past few months, we’ve received a lot of feedback and we’ve tried iterate on some of it. The biggest area of focus was to reduce the clutter of links and text and organize the page flow a bit better.

Do the web pages look better now?  Did we reduce some of the link and text clutter from our current version of restaurant search website here.

You’ll also notice a new feature on our city profile pages and restaurant detail pages to showcase some of our semantic meta data. Each restaurant detail page now features “Top Sentiments” from all the reviewers across all the sources we’ve aggregated and you can instantly get a gist of what’s popular at that restaurant. The city profile page now shows, “best-of” categories for you to explore various dining options. E.g Mountain View city page offers recommendations such as “Best Weekend Lunch ” at Cafe Baklava, “Best parties” at Xanh Restaurant and “Best Lunch Buffet” at Amber India.

Take our new website for a spin and let us know what you think.  Please leave feedback in the comments section here.

Planning a romantic dinner for two from the comfort of your home? Or, driving down the peninsula in your buddy’s car while subconsciously craving for delicious Tiramisu? Well, BooRah is here to help you no matter where you are or how ‘connected’ you are. We just rolled out the next rev of our semantic full-text search engine.

Why use BooRah?

• It’s easy! No filters to play with, no search refinement. Our search engine just gets it. here, try out a few searches: best foie gras in san francisco, great view san francisco, tiramisu menlo park, best deep dish pizza in chicago
• Access anyway you like:
  • We now support mobile users. Simply punch in boorah.com on your mobile browser and you’re on your way.
  • Smart browser search plugin. Install our plugin and be amazed how well it understands various queries
    
    Note: Works only on Firefox 2.0+ and IE7+
  • SMS search: Text “boorah <search query>” to 4INFO (44636) to receive results via SMS
    E.g.: boorah pho mountain view
• Look Beyond options: BooRah will prompt you to look beyond your current geography when there aren’t enough choices. E.g., a search for Pad Thai in Atherton, CA yields no results. However, check out how easily you can look around in neighboring cities.
  
• Utility links: We have aggregated hundreds of thousands of useful links so you don’t have to go looking for restaurant discounts, online reservations, or menus. Try it yourself: reservations in Palo Alto, discounts in New York, online menus in Mountain View

What do you think? Tell us what you like or don’t like about our search.

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.