BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Today, we’re announcing the launch of our restaurant guide in Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami metropolitan areas. This brings the total number of metro areas covered to 15 and we are working on introducing our service to other parts of the country as well. Here are quick links for a couple these metro areas:

Restaurants in Washington DC - Baltimore Area
Restaurants in Philadelphia

In launching Las Vegas Restaurants, we encountered some interesting technical challenges in our crawling algorithm. It turns out, that most of the restaurants (atleast the popular ones) are located inside the hotels/casinos and do not have proper address and contact information in the yellow page listings. We had to tweak our entity-mapper to incorporate additional fuzzy heuristics. This will turn turn out to be very valuable in aggregating content for businesses that only have a PO Box or 1-800 telephone numbers as we expand to other categories.

We have also reached some significant milestones on the content side, a demonstration of the scalability of our semantic crawler and sentiment extraction platform. I’ll share additional details with some technical analysis today/tomorrow.