BooRah Wins Yahoo SearchMonkey Contest!
Friday, July 11th, 2008
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!