BooRah - Inside the Buzz

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.

Last month, We announced the list of top restaurant bloggers which is compiled automatically by our semantic crawling platform. Simply put, it associates blog posts from various bloggers to specific restaurants and ranks the contributing bloggers. We are seeing great interest in our technology since launch and have gotten some very good feedback. Today, we are launching a feature that enables the contributing bloggers to claim their blog profile pages on BooRah and show case the ranking. Here are a couple of examples:

• Anna Haight of mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com
• Jo Boston of jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com

As we gather new blog posts and content from other bloggers, these rankings will dynamically change to reflect the latest ranking. We hope you will find this feature interesting and valuable to showcase your BooRah generated rankings. The process to claim your blogs is very simple. We’ll give you a piece of code that you can drop into your blog. To get started here’s a link to the list of all the top restaurant blogs. You can click on your blog and start the claim process. Here is the top 10 list currently, and you can use the link from here as a shortcut:

1. mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com - Anna Haight
2. ocmexfood.blogspot.com - ChristianZ
3. pleasurepalate.blogspot.com - pleasurepalate
4. foodandthings.blogspot.com - Food and Things
5. foodhoe.wordpress.com - foodhoe
6. kikimaraschino.blogspot.com - Kiki Maraschino
7. what2order.blogspot.com - kewlio
8. bestburgersfbay.blogspot.com - Scott Kline
9. jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com - Jo
10. foodieuniverse.blogspot.com - Foodie Universe

At this time, we do not have a easy search tool for other bloggers not listed in this list, but if you will leave a quick comment, we’ll get back to you with your rank and a link to claim your blog.

If you have other thoughts or comments, don’t hesitate to drop a note here.

Last week was a big week for us. We announced the expansion of our restaurant reviews and rating service to 5 additional metro areas. With this announcement, we have now launched over 3000 cities and 225,000 restaurants in 15 metropolitan areas. Since we started our expansion plans early this year, we’ve been able to expand quickly, thanks to our maturing platform. So here’s our current progress - by the numbers:

• Since Late January, we launched 12 new metro areas, which is approximately 1 new metropolitan area/week
• Our restaurant service is now available across 3,000 cities in 16 different states.
• We have added about 500,000 reviews this year bring our total review count to 1,110,000+ reviews.
• In the San Francisco Bay Area, our first metro, we have reviews for 13,500 restaurants (65-70% of all restaurants in the metro area)
• Our review sources not only include popular review sites but also long tail content from bloggers and other influencers. Infact, we analyze over 100,000 blogs and extract reviews and posts dedicated to restaurants. The process of analyzing 1000’s of blog entries every day is completely automated and a result of our patent-pending semantic entity extraction system. See “Top Rated Restaurant Blogs” for more information.
• Our crawler extracts related attributes such as tags, cuisines, pictures, etc., We’ve also integrated with a few strategic partners to offer menus, reservations, takeouts and discounts. To date, we feature -
  • 45,000 Restaurant Menus
  • 35,000 Pictures for Restaurants
  • 4,000 Restaurants with Online Reservations
  • 8,500 Restaurant Discount Coupons and Offers
• Our NLP engine extracts “Boos” and “Rahs” from user reviews and has identified over 10 Million sentiments from the reviews todate. This meta data powers our summaries and ratings which you see on the website.

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.

The James Beard Foundation Awards recognize the most outstanding talent in food and beverage industry. As usual, New York city has quite a few nominations followed by other top cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

You can search BooRah for nominees and write a review to share your experiences at the restaurant.

• James Beard Nominees in New York City
• James Beard Nominees in San Francisco
• James Beard Nominees in Los Angeles
• James Beard Nominees in Chicago
• James Beard Nominees in Seattle

You can check the entire list and get additional details from the James Beard Foundation website.

Today, BooRah is launching a new program that can benefit charities such as Sankara Eye Foundation, Children’s Tumor Foundation and America’s Second Harvest Food Bank. We’re requesting passionate people to sign up as BooRah members, invite their friends and families to participate, and thereby help these deserving organizations. Being a small company with many financial constraints, this is an option that lets us spread the word about our company while contributing to a worthy cause.
In early 2000, I came across a couple of my Indian friends who were volunteers at a relatively unknown charitable organization called Sankara Eye Foundation. As I saw their passion and dedication to realize a dream of “20/20 by year 2020″ in India, I felt compelled to participate and contribute. Today, they perform about 70,000 free eye surgeries every year and continue to expand. While their donations continue to grow, it is the grass roots efforts of their members that have made the organization vibrant and a model for many.

Locally, we continue to struggle with overwhelming burden of sub-prime mortgage melt down, inflation and threats to national security. People are turning to food banks and soup kitchens for help with basic necessities. According to the March 20th Wall Street Journal, local food banks are struggling at a time when more and more people are having trouble making the ends meet. The federal government and a number of corporations such as Walmart are stepping in to help in a big way.

Each year, 1 in 3,000 children throughout the world are born with a genetic disorder called Neurofibromatosis (NF). NF causes tumors to grow anywhere on or in the body, and can lead to severe forms of brain tumors, learning disabilities, and deformities. There is no cure. The Children’s Tumor Foundation is dedicated to ending NF through research and to improving the health and well being of those affected by NF.

We at BooRah, want to make a difference, in our own small way!

Tell your friends to join BooRah today and sign up to contribute to one of the above charities. In exploring BooRah, we hope that you’ll also have a found a new destination on the Internet for you to pick a restaurant for your next dining occasion.

BooRah will contribute $.10 to the charity you select, for you and for every new BooRah member referred by you through BooRah’s “donate to charity” program between March 23 and April 30, 2008 - up to $1,000 in total contributions. We’ll make the contributions during the month of May 2008. You must use BooRah website for us to process your referrals correctly. You can sign up for “donate to charity” program at http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/signup/charity.html

Many foodie bloggers contribute invaluable content about restaurants for consumers to explore new tastes. If you happen to search for restaurants in Yahoo or Google, you are likely to come across CitySearch, or Yelp and sometimes, BooRah . However, blogs offer a wealth of information that one cannot glean off of review sites. By way of descriptive narratives and gorgeous pictures, they encourage you to try new dishes and discover new local favorites.. There are 1000’s of foodie bloggers across the country who dedicate their time and effort to bring out the “best restaurants” for the communities they live in/dine around. At BooRah, we thrive on featuring the best content across the Internet. Our mission is to help people make the best dining decisions as well as bring visibility to all reviewers including bloggers who contribute in modestly small numbers but make up a big chunk of the long tail of restaurant content on the Internet. So with the introduction of our new blog analysis platform(still in alpha) , here’s our initial top 100 restaurant blogger list.

E.g., take Anna Haight of mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com, who describes restaurants in a wonderfully pleasant way with great pictures of food that seem to make you hungry instantly. We have counted 91 different blog posts, 29 of which we could associate with restaurants in our database with many many pictures to see and explore. Imagine the richness of all this content at your disposal. Similarly ChristianZ and PleasurePalate create invaluable content for locations around Los Angeles that are otherwise starved for great content. One of such foodie blogs will help you find a dinner to delight the palate.

I’ve listed the top 25 blogs here:

1. mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com - Anna Haight
2. ocmexfood.blogspot.com - ChristianZ
3. pleasurepalate.blogspot.com - pleasurepalate
4. foodandthings.blogspot.com - Food and Things
5. foodhoe.wordpress.com - foodhoe
6. kikimaraschino.blogspot.com - Kiki Maraschino
7. foodieuniverse.blogspot.com - Foodie Universe
8. what2order.blogspot.com - kewlio
9. elmomonster.blogspot.com - elmomonster
10. 52flavorsnyc.blogspot.com - Jen
11. bayfood.blogspot.com - Lucie
12. eateryrow.blogspot.com - Jon Parker
13. jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com - Jo
14. sgcuizine.blogspot.com - Sharona
15. sisterswhoeat.blogspot.com - sister#2
16. dinerwood.blogspot.com - Mike “Pie is a Food not a Number” Tanner
17. wtle-new-york.blogspot.com - Admin
18. aki-eats.blogspot.com - aki
19. tastetests.blogspot.com - taste tester
20. foodmakesmehappy.blogspot.com - Cindy. Lo.
21. hiddennewyork.blogspot.com - Marc
22. chungfood.blogspot.com - David
23. finechina.wordpress.com - finechina
24. umamimart.blogspot.com - kayoko
25. wtle-miami.blogspot.com - Admin

Here’s a plain English explanation of our algorithm that is used to compute the rankings. We process over 100,000 blogs and identify which of those blogs have content related to restaurants. When we process an individual blog entry from a blogger, our semantic entity-mapper looks for information that can help us associate the blog post with one of the known restaurants in our database. In many cases an address or phone number or both will help but we can also associate through fuzzy, natural language entity mapping. To explain further, here’s a blog post about restaurant Kowloon in Saugus. Our semantic extraction identifies Kowloon as a restaurant and Saugus as a place and associates them together and looks for restaurants that match the criteria.

Once the association has happened, the ranking algorithm is a straight tally of all the reviewed restaurants by any blogger. Additional points are awarded to blogs with pictures (which is an indication of the quality of the content). We also extract boos & rahs from the content to identify the sentiment expressed by the author.

If there are bugs that any of you can identify with entity association or missing mappings - let us know and we’ll correct any bugs as soon as possible. Also, in future, if you could add additional restaurant details such as name, address and phone in the blog, it would be easy to associate your content with a restaurant and provide attribution and credit to your post.

Note: If your blog is missing in our database, let us know and we’ll investigate.

For all those users, who’ve requested a simpler search option for boorah restaurants, we’ve just deployed a newer lightweight web functionality. E.g you can now search for restaurants on the phone with this new link http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/m

Check it out.

BooRah’s City landing pages bear a new look now. It combines of better visual design, user experience and navigational elements. We are pretty happy about and hope you’lll like it. For example, check out Restaurants in San Francisco.  The home page now gives you a quick view of all the possible options for you  to start your restaurant search. You can now find

• Top Rated Restaurants
• Search for Restaurants by best Cuisines in the city
• New Restaurants
• Restaurants with Discounts or Coupons
• Check out online menus and order takeouts

In addition, we’ve also started incorporating content from various blogs across the Internet that talk about restaurants in our coverage area. You can see the content under "Foodie Blogs" section. Blogs contribute very high quality content for various restaurants and we’d like to bring visibility to top blogs so consumers can easily access the rich content and benefit from it. Stay tuned as we will provide additional details in future posts.

Take a look at our new look and feel and let us know if you like it