• 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

So here’s another clever BooRah application that shows you the Ten Best Restaurants on a Map — that is, we show you your 10 top choices as determined by the area shown on the map.  Zoom in tight on the map, and we’ll show you up to 10 very close-by choices; zoom the map out a bit, and we’ll choose the top 10 based on a broader selection of choices.

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.

I’ll be moderating a session that will include demos from companies that are prominently featured in any semantic discussion.  Here’s the information on that session T4: Demo Hour - Semantic Search Solutions.

There are some other sessions that should be pretty exciting too. Mark your calendars and see you there.

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.

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.

So, who should a consumer trust? It raises a broader question about online credibility, reviews, and credentials — not only was Wine Spectator scammed, but the perpetrator (and his friends?) posted fake “reviews” about the restaurant on the restaurant discussion board Chowhound. So, if it’s so easy to game the system about a restaurant’s credentials, what’s a consumer to do?

Each restaurant site has its own methods for ensuring “trustworthiness”, some obviously better than others. At BooRah, we feel there is inherent value in seeing all the perspectives about a restaurant in a single place (even including the restaurants’ own view). This multi-sourced approach means that the inevitable “gaming” that’s being done will be more visible to the consumer. For example, if the same user is posting similar reviews about a restaurant across multiple sites within a few days of each other, that fact will be readily apparent for what it is when the reviews are seen right next to each other. Further, the sheer number of reviews that are collected will tend to “drown out” the outlying activities by a gamer, forcing the amount of effort that’s required to “game the system” to go up — now a gamer has to post reviews across dozens of sites, not just a single site. Of course, any system can be gamed - we see visibility and transparency by aggregation and summarization of content on the Internet playing a very important role in helping to minimize the impact of this gaming.

Last week was the annual gathering of search engines and folks from search industry at SES in San Jose. It is amazing to see how mature the search industry has become by seeing 1000’s of people show up even in a down economy. Many of the key industry thought leaders including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others were present to share their ideas and thoughts.

Here are  my top 3 takeaways from the conference:

1. Search enhancements continue to focus around relevance and engagement. Relevance is highly dependent on user intent and search engines are spending a lot of time analyzing ways of getting to user intent. I was on a semantic search panel and we had a very thoughtful discussion around the future of open search and how semantic search could increase relevance for consumers. Here’s some very good coverage about the session by San Francisco Chronicle, InternetNews.com and ClickZ about the session.
2. Long tail is becoming highly relevant and more companies are beginning to capitalize from search and advertising perspective. There were a couple of sessions that discussed how advertising on the long tail networks such as looksmart or quigo could be significantly advantageous compared to the larger networks ( although the volumes still aren’t available). Consumers are also beginning to explore the power of search engines by trying long tail queries specifically for products and local services. Infact we here at BooRah are also seeing a decent increase in long tail volume for restaurants.
3. Though mobile wasn’t a big topic nor was local search, many of the keynotes and other panels discussed how small businesses were still behind the 8-ball and how newer phone platforms such as IPhone were really driving adoption ( not just in the major metro areas but also middle America). Kelsey group hosted a couple sessions around these themes and were very informational.

I could only attend the first day and a few other sessions of interest, but all in all, the conference was very well organized with some good keynotes and networking opportunities. Thanks to staff of SES for a great conference!

BooRah’s portfolio of discounts now includes many ways to save — like 2-for-1 entrees,  20%-off savings coupons, discount Gift Certificates (ie, buy a $25 gift certificate for $10), free appetizers, and loyalty rewards of free gift certificates and free drinks after a certain number of visits.

Now, there’s no reason to stay at home — you can eat out, and save money at the same time with BooRah.

BooRah focuses on building a community between restaurants and consumers. The customer loyalty product for businesses enables them to collect comments from customers (favorable or critical) and selectively publish them. These are comments that diners are making for restaurant owners, not reviews being written publicly on the BooRah site. Additionally, they also drive repeat diners by rewarding them for their loyalty. Check out more about restaurant loyalty programs