I’ll be a panelist at SES San Jose 2008 along with Yahoo, Ask.com, Powerset and Hakia on a session about Semantic Search. Semantic technologies are becoming increasingly relevant in our lives and it’s timely that the folks at SES have decided to create a track for this topic.
Here’s the summary of the session title “Semantic Search: How will it change our lives?”
As search dominates our Internet use, this session will explore the new generation of semantic technologies that look to radically change the future. Different companies have taken different approaches to increasing relevance and improving quality of search results. From true natural language search being pursued by companies like Powerset/Hakia, to vertical-focused semantic companies such as BooRah and Uptake, this session will discuss how consumers will benefit directly from these new sets of Internet destinations or enhance experience on existing search engines.
Please join me and other speakers for this session on August 18, 2008 at 11:15 AM. See you there.
If you’re a restaurant owner or employee who’s considering writing fake reviews of your restaurant on review sites, watch this short video by Gordon Ramsey first (excerpted from the TV show Kitchen Nightmares):
(by way of Pegasus News).
And, in all seriousness, be sure to take a look at the debates that are going on in the blogosphere around what constitutes a “fake” versus “real” review (be sure to read the comments in addition to the main article posts):
We at BooRah seek to show you all of the reviews, from as many different sources as we can, so that you as a restaurant consumer can make up your own mind as to what’s “real” and what’s “fake”. And if you’re a restaurant owner, we have programs to help you gain real, direct feedback from customers that you know have actually dined at your establishment.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week on the Bennigan’s chain shuttering it’s 200 company-owned locations of Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale. What wasn’t broadly reported outside of the WSJ article, however, is that 138 of their franchise-owned locations will stay open — at least for the time being.
So it appears the 138 still-remaining Bennigan’s have the challenge of letting people know that yes, they are still open! (Like this one, these ones, this one)
We here at BooRah are happy to help out the owners/managers of any of the remaining Bennigan’s to get the word out. Feel free to post a comment here or drop us a line at info@boorah.com with the location and your contact info and we’ll make sure that your listing on BooRah is updated to reflect that you are in fact still open. And any Bennigan’s owner/manager who contacts us in this way will get a free month of advertising with a sponsored listing on BooRah with the notation “We’re still open!” on it.
Come meet us at SF Beta’s Midsummer mixer tomorrow at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. No specific dress suggested, just come chipper and ready for drinks, friends, colleagues, demos, and all the good stuff SF Beta has to offer. Light appetizers from Sauce Restaurant, San Francisco are provided. BooRah is at demo table 1 between 5 - 7 PM, come by and check us out. We’ll have a draw for a $75 gift certificate towards your favorite restaurant for folks who sign up as BooRah members at the table.
Yahoo, this morning announced the winners of it’s SearchMonkey contest. And, we are glad to have won the first prize in the InfoBar category. Special congratulations go out to our team member, Shrisha Radhakrishna, who spearheaded the integration effort.
SearchMonkey is the first of many initiatives for Yahoo’s Open Strategy (See ReadWriteWeb story). Earlier this week, Yahoo also announced a program to open up their existing API’s for unlimited use with no restrictions on branding/linking. We’re excited to make use of Yahoo’s open platform, with our semantic technology, to enhance the user experience and relevance for our customers. Kudos to Yahoo for taking such a bold step in the tumultuous world of Search.
Now for the details of our InfoBar implementation:
InfoBar is an application within SearchMonkey that allows additional information to be shown along with the search result. Below is a search result for “best restaurants in san jose” that has been enhanced by InfoBar (NOTE: You’ll need to be logged in to Yahoo and add the BooRah application in your profile to see these results. See post for instructions).
By expanding the search result, you can see the enhanced result within the same page.
You’ll see the top 3 restaurants and their overall ratings along with a link to start exploring the site, providing a preview of what to expect when a user lands on the site. For this result example, “Falafel drive Inn” received a 93% positive rating based on 353 reviews, “Maggiano’s” scored 89% out of 324 reviews and “Original Joe’s” scored 82% based on 290 reviews. This information was all derived from the sentiment in the written text of the reviews using BooRah’s patent-pending NLP engine.
Here’s another example — a search for “oola in san francisco“. The specific restaurant search is enhanced by displaying the most relevant attribute “tags” that were extracted from the user reviews:
In this example, “oysters”, “chicken ravioli”, “bartenders”, “fish dishes”, etc., were highly raved about in the user reviews. We also provide drilldown on ratings for food, service and ambiance to aid user evaluation before leaving the search results page.
We hope you’ll add BooRah InfoBar application to your profile and enhance your search results and relevance next time you search on Yahoo!
Kosmix, recently expanded their website to include a lot more than just health, travel and autos. Kosmix specializes in “algorithmically generated topic pages” for broader navigation/exploration unlike Google. In launching the new website, they’ve integrated BooRah to power restaurant searches. Kosmix uses our powerful restaurant search XML API in real-time to offer highly relevant results. E.g, check out Restaurants in Los Gatos, CA or Restaurants in San Francisco,CA to see the topic page and easy navigational links to BooRah and other sites.
Read Kosmix launch analysis from Anand Rajaraman, one of the Kosmix founders, here.
Time.com announced it’s 50 Best Websites for 2008 earlier this week. Even though we didn’t quite make it to the list, we’re thrilled to have received a mention in their evaluation. We know we have a few things to fix to hit the next level of usability for consumers and are working diligently within our constraints to provide a very valuable service. Many thanks to Anita Hamilton.
Last week Peggy Anne Salz also did a very extensive piece about our mobile application on msearchgroove.com. Her perspective on blending social recommendations and semantic search is quite creative and we’re definitely looking into enhancing features in that direction.
WapReview.com also wrote a review about our mobile service and we are humbled by Dennis’ evaluation.
As always, we look forward to valuable feedback from you in building a service that you’ll love.
We all have had our share of interesting experiences while eating out. Share a fun story about your restaurant experience and enter to win a $75 Gift card. Here’s one for starters:
A few of us (some colleagues were traveling on business) once visited this popular thai restaurant. As we got to the restaurant, we realized that we all had to sit on raised bamboo floor and take our shoes off. Quite a predicament! One of the gals refused to take her shoes off, turns out she hadn’t changed her socks in a few days and was concerned they’d smell. Finally, after much convincing, she agreed to take the socks off as well and sat little farther away from group with her feet spread outward. As we were ready to leave, some one from the adjacent table approached her, chatted for a few mins and handed her his business card. As luck would have it, the guy was a footwear designer and wanted to cast her in a footwear commercial! We all just couldn’t help but giggle and laugh at the whole situation when we found out about it later.
Now that may be an unusual story, but we’re sure some of you have some interesting aspects to share with us. Here are a few themes to trigger your memory :
Romantic date(s)
Family parties/get togethers
Business meals or trips out of town
Restaurants in your neighborhood that you hadn’t discovered in a decade
Interesting ordering situations
So, just jot down a few quick comments from your experience in response to this blog and you’re entered to win $75 Gift Card.
We’ll award the gift card to the best story (in our sole determination) posted in the comments to this blog by the end of the day on June 18. Please be sure to include your email address.
OpenID has come a long way since it’s inception a year and a half ago. It’s usage has gone mainstream, & open source libraries are available to help companies enable their own sites for OpenID. With BooRah’s growing user-base and multiple partners we’re integrating with, there is no better time to support this open standard on our site. So, you can now login to BooRah with your OpenID and start experiencing seamless integration with some of our partners (others to come).
Yahoo’s SearchMonkey is a unique step in opening up search to publishers to enhance the quality of the search experience for consumers. Earlier this week, Alex Iskold over at ReadWriteWeb wrote an interesting post quoting Peter Mika about how meta data needs to be on the page for users to see and experience it. We, at BooRah, have focused not only on extracting structured meta data such as tags, ratings etc., but also inferring relevant meta data from sentiments in user reviews (in restaurants for now) using sentiment extraction technology. The following listing is an example of search result on Yahoo for a popular San Francisco restaurant - Oola.
This first page listing for Oola in San Francisco contains more relevant information for a consumer than any of the other search results on that page. With one click, one can see the restaurant’s menu, make a reservation, write a review, and get discounts!. Also, based on our inferred meta data, the user sees that “ahi tuna appetizers”, “oysters” etc.. are worth exploring at that place. Furthermore, the granularity of the rating helps users that are looking to dine out on special occasions.
Come meet us at 
Kosmix, recently expanded their website to include a lot more than just health, travel and autos. Kosmix specializes in “algorithmically generated topic pages” for broader navigation/exploration unlike Google. In launching the new website, they’ve integrated BooRah to power restaurant searches. Kosmix uses our powerful restaurant search XML API in real-time to offer highly relevant results. E.g, check out
Time.com announced it’s 