BooRah - Inside the Buzz

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.

To see our enhanced results in Yahoo for your searches,  visit http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=wKB and select the “Add Infobar” button .

So, take BooRah’s SearchMonkey implementation for a spin and let us know what you think.

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.

Foodies, here’s your opportunity to taste and dine at the top restaurants in San Francisco.  You can try out restaurants like Aziza, Foreign Cinema, Oola and many others at very affordable prices.

If you missed the January 2008 event, here’s a second chance for you to try your favorite restaurant or a hot spot that would otherwise be an expensive affair. Specially prepared 3-course lunch are $21.95 and dinners are $31.95.  Dates and times of participation vary by restaurant.   You can check out all the participating restaurants  along with their reviews and ratings on BooRah. BooRah has aggregated all the reviews from various sources for these restaurants and gives you a quick snapshot of which restaurants offer the best food or service or atmosphere. So, create your “Favorite Dine About Restaurant List” on BooRah (see mine here)and go out and have fun. If you’d like to write reviews and rate those restaurants, you can always come back to BooRah and  make it your destination for all restaurant searches.

Enjoy early summer and indulge yourself with food and wine at the 2008 Dine About Town event.

Restaurant Hospitality Magazine writes about some tactics that restaurant owners could start to use to try to strike back against negative reviews/comments about their restaurant on the web:

“You’ve had to put up with the zero-accountability blogging phenomenon for years. But now a new option has emerged: you can hire an independent, third-party company to manage your online reputation. Their promise: No matter what a disgruntled customer, former employee or competitor posts about your restaurant, the online reputation management company will make it difficult for potential customers to find those negative references on the web.”

We here at BooRah have certainly heard our share of complaints about all the “drive-by” restaurant reviewers out there.   For example, in response to a question posed to panelists at the recent Restaurant Bootcamp here in San Francisco - “Q: What’s the biggest challenge to starting a restaurant?” the answer was a single word: “Yelp”.

So, as a service for restaurateurs, we’ve recently introduced a free service - Track Your Restaurant Reviews. Once you sign up, if your restaurant gets a review written about it, we’ll let you know.

While we don’t condone sketchy tactics like trying to “hide” reviews — in fact, we do our best to provide a cross-source, objective look at all restaurant reviews — what you do next is your business.

Here are two search queries that I’ve been pointed to, that deliver great relevance on BooRah.

• Restaurants with Great View in San Francisco
• Restaurants that serve Idly Sambar near 110 Rio Robles, San Jose

For the “great view in San Francisco” search, the results were really good, but what amazed me was the accompanying map that lends credibility to the results.

The second search is something that I’d do often but have not tried it until now. Idli Sambar is a south indian breakfast, snack, appetizer item that is a very frequently ordered at a south Indian restaurant. Not only are the results on the attached screen right on, but if you search for other options beyond the 5 mile radius( idli sambar beyond san jose), you get the complete list of places for you to choose from, which is perfect (atleast for Shrisha and my tastes).

What are your favorite searches on BooRah?

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.

The past week was a good week for us. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an indepth analysis of his BooRah experience in his article on ReadWriteWeb here. We are thrilled that he liked our technology and service. Matt Murphy also wrote a very comprehensive piece on EmilyChang.com and explains his navigational experience and various aspects of technology he likes. Mashable.com’s Review about BooRah also had very good things to say about our content and service. We are very excited about the positive reviews but realize that we need to make a lot of progress and keep up the steady focus to improve the quality and performance of our service. There was also a great deal of feedback in various forums and discussion boards about pros/cons of BooRah service. We appreciate all the comments.

We are working on enhancing our site navigation, reducing clutter on various webpages, optimizing google ads, and improving the search relevance. We are also working on mobile support. User Interaction and Design is an area that needs to be improved quite a bit but we’re focused on making the service right for now.

On friday, I was also invited to be on a digital culinary panel comprising of Chow.com, Gayot and FoodBuzz for their first New Media Taste Makers Event hosted by TasteTV. Thanks to A.K. Crump and TasteTV crew for a very informative and well organized event.(Picture by Alicia Lin of Mashable)

There’s nothing like talking with a bunch of restaurant owners to gain a different perspective on the Internet. Sitting in an office on the Internet is about as far away from the realities of running a restaurant as you can get. With 50 or 100 hungry customers waiting to be served a nice meal and pay you in cash (or credit card) for it, where are you going to focus your attention?

An observant restaurant owner will learn a lot more about whether or not diners are enjoying his/her restaurant by watching them, or talking with them, than anything on the Internet will tell them. And certainly building your business and garnering the most positive-word-of-mouth starts with making your current customers ecstatic.

In this context then, it’s not surprising that some restaurant owners take offense to the “drive-by shooting” nature of online reviews — from their perspective, a lot of reviews are unjust, unfair, written only to gain social “status” on a review site, or even made-up slam pieces written by their competitors. What I’ve heard from restaurant owners is that they’d really like a way to engage WITH their customers better, not combat them in an anonymous fashion.

And restaurant owners are willing to reward these ongoing relationships and dialogs, with loyalty programs like Beach Chalet’s free dinner for two, Caprino’s free $25 gift certificate, to discounted offers like Oola’s.

What each of these restaurants knows is that building frequent, loyal customers — and rewarding those customers for their loyalty — is one of the best ways to build their businesses.

 Today announced launch of our service in 6 additional metropolitan areas. This brings our total metro count to 20. Since we started our geographical expansion in late Jan 2008, we have been adding a new metro area almost at the rate of 1/week. Here’s quick links to the top cities in the new metros: Restaurants in Detroit, Orlando Restaurants, Houston Restaurants, Austin Restaurants, Dallas Restaurants, and San Antonio Restaurants

We also announced a nationwide partnership with AmericanTowns.com, a network of community-based websites. Using our Javascript syndication platform, we are now powering restaurants search for 1000’s of cities on their website. E.g  Here’s a link on their website to san francisco restaurants

We are excited at the pace we are able to open up new markets and provide coverage at a national level in a short period.

Monday (04/21/2008) is Alternative Search Engines Day in San Francisco. Charles Knight and the good folks at ReadWriteWeb were kind enough to invite us to participate and share our perspective on NLP search. The sponsoring search engines for this invitation-only event are SeeqPod, UpTake, Matchpoint, HealthPricer, and GoPubMed.

See you there.