BooRah - Inside the Buzz

We’re happy to announce the launch of our  free, location-enabled Web Services API for Web sites and businesses looking to offer online restaurant reviews and ratings to their visitors. This web search API augments our existing syndication platform which is used by multiple newspaper and local destination websites. The key features of BooRah’s Web Services API are:

• Restaurant Search – Search for top rated restaurants across the US by City, Zip, Neighborhood, Point of Interest, Address, Street/Cross-Street, and Geo-Coordinates
• Restaurant Ratings – Get detailed ratings for Food, Service and Ambiance
• Restaurant Features – Get links for Discounts, Menus, Coupons, Takeout and many other valuable features

We are thrilled with the developments in the area of location-based services and recent announcements by Mozilla’s Geode, Loki’s browser-plugin and Iphone/Android platforms. We believe that BooRah’s semantic technology is uniquely positioned to deliver necessary content for mobile applications. The release of this API is a first step in supporting development of location-enabled restaurant applications are we are eager to drive the adoption by enhancing based on requirements from the community.

Here is the link to access our Restaurant Search API documentation.

Kosmix.com, a popular Internet destination that organizes content by topics,  is already using our API to enable consumers to search for favorite local restaurants.

We look forward to engaging with the developers to drive the adoption of this platform and enhance it further. Please send any questions regarding the API to api@boorah.com

JupiterMedia is hosting the Web3.0 event in San Francisco on Oct 16-17. The conference will explore  the strategies, tools, technologies and the big ideas necessary for building impactful, socially relevant, and profitable Web 3.0 products, services and companies. 2008 has already seen a rise in  prominence in the area of semantic technology and it’s application in multiple areas.

I’ll be moderating a session that will include demos from companies that are prominently featured in any semantic discussion.  Here’s the information on that session T4: Demo Hour - Semantic Search Solutions.

There are some other sessions that should be pretty exciting too. Mark your calendars and see you there.

Last week, we launched a new website ( check out new site here). With this launch, not only do we cater to consumers who are looking for great dining recommendations but also to restaurants who are looking for equal footing in managing their reputation online.

We’ve created a new “Restaurant Dashboard” that allows the restaurants to track new reviews each week, get trends of reviews & ratings, and manage repeat diners. Participants of our loyalty program  get detailed reporting including  diner registrations, private reviews, survey results and other data.

About 3 months ago, we launched a “Customer Loyalty” program for restaurants. The main focus was to allow the restaurants to reward repeat diners for their loyalty while collecting private, but direct feedback on their experience. In talking with our restaurant customers in the past few days, it’s great to hear them say how much they love what we’re doing and how we are uniquely positioned to foster an ecosystem where consumers and restaurants participate alike.

For starters, here’s how BooRah helps restaurants manage their businesses - these are all FREE services

 Track Reviews - BooRah aggregates reviews from various review sites, blogs, and professional critics and generates a weekly summary report for the restaurant - this helps them track all the reviews about their restaurant at one place

Enhance Listing - A restaurant owner can claim their restaurant and manage information about the restaurant. One can upload pictures, provide links to a menu, add a brief description, or offer discounts to consumers

Useful Links & Blog -  Online Restaurant Marketing contains valuable information for restaurants and what they should be doing to build up awareness on the Internet.

The “Customer Loyalty” product  allows restaurants to track their loyal diners and reward them for their loyalty. Unlike other loyalty programs, where only the restaurant knows how many times a customer has dined at their restaurant, the DineTrak system  offers visibility to the diner and the restaurant as well. It not only tracks each dine event but captures valuable survey about their dining experience and written feedback.

All the survey data and feedback is visible only to the restaurant unless they explicity choose to make it public. Restaurants love to (as we would all) get feedback from actual diners and improve on their low-points without necessarily telling the world. Infact, the restaurants can directly reach out to the diners and extend their zone of influence.

Now here’s the most interesting by-product of this program -

Our core technology, the semantic engine,  generates ratings for food, service and ambiance from user reviews & blogs across the Internet. We have done multiple benchmarks against best rating sites and have proven that we are better or equal than those through use of technology alone. We now have an additional data point to benchmark our service against, survey results from actual diners. I’m glad to report that using the 2 months of data from surveys from loyalty program customers, our semantic rankings are completely inline with actual diner ratings. We’re very happy with the quality of the semantic results and ability to correlate them with actual diner feedback - something, that in the longer run, could be the underpinning of a consistent rating system across all local businesses.

We’re staging a new look for BooRah here. Over the past few months, we’ve received a lot of feedback and we’ve tried iterate on some of it. The biggest area of focus was to reduce the clutter of links and text and organize the page flow a bit better.

Do the web pages look better now?  Did we reduce some of the link and text clutter from our current version of restaurant search website here.

You’ll also notice a new feature on our city profile pages and restaurant detail pages to showcase some of our semantic meta data. Each restaurant detail page now features “Top Sentiments” from all the reviewers across all the sources we’ve aggregated and you can instantly get a gist of what’s popular at that restaurant. The city profile page now shows, “best-of” categories for you to explore various dining options. E.g Mountain View city page offers recommendations such as “Best Weekend Lunch ” at Cafe Baklava, “Best parties” at Xanh Restaurant and “Best Lunch Buffet” at Amber India.

Take our new website for a spin and let us know what you think.  Please leave feedback in the comments section here.

Last week was the annual gathering of search engines and folks from search industry at SES in San Jose. It is amazing to see how mature the search industry has become by seeing 1000’s of people show up even in a down economy. Many of the key industry thought leaders including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others were present to share their ideas and thoughts.

Here are  my top 3 takeaways from the conference:

1. Search enhancements continue to focus around relevance and engagement. Relevance is highly dependent on user intent and search engines are spending a lot of time analyzing ways of getting to user intent. I was on a semantic search panel and we had a very thoughtful discussion around the future of open search and how semantic search could increase relevance for consumers. Here’s some very good coverage about the session by San Francisco Chronicle, InternetNews.com and ClickZ about the session.
2. Long tail is becoming highly relevant and more companies are beginning to capitalize from search and advertising perspective. There were a couple of sessions that discussed how advertising on the long tail networks such as looksmart or quigo could be significantly advantageous compared to the larger networks ( although the volumes still aren’t available). Consumers are also beginning to explore the power of search engines by trying long tail queries specifically for products and local services. Infact we here at BooRah are also seeing a decent increase in long tail volume for restaurants.
3. Though mobile wasn’t a big topic nor was local search, many of the keynotes and other panels discussed how small businesses were still behind the 8-ball and how newer phone platforms such as IPhone were really driving adoption ( not just in the major metro areas but also middle America). Kelsey group hosted a couple sessions around these themes and were very informational.

I could only attend the first day and a few other sessions of interest, but all in all, the conference was very well organized with some good keynotes and networking opportunities. Thanks to staff of SES for a great conference!

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.

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).

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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.

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.