BooRah - Inside the Buzz

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!

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.