BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Planning a romantic dinner for two from the comfort of your home? Or, driving down the peninsula in your buddy’s car while subconsciously craving for delicious Tiramisu? Well, BooRah is here to help you no matter where you are or how ‘connected’ you are. We just rolled out the next rev of our semantic full-text search engine.

Why use BooRah?

• It’s easy! No filters to play with, no search refinement. Our search engine just gets it. here, try out a few searches: best foie gras in san francisco, great view san francisco, tiramisu menlo park, best deep dish pizza in chicago
• Access anyway you like:
  • We now support mobile users. Simply punch in boorah.com on your mobile browser and you’re on your way.
  • Smart browser search plugin. Install our plugin and be amazed how well it understands various queries
    
    Note: Works only on Firefox 2.0+ and IE7+
  • SMS search: Text “boorah <search query>” to 4INFO (44636) to receive results via SMS
    E.g.: boorah pho mountain view
• Look Beyond options: BooRah will prompt you to look beyond your current geography when there aren’t enough choices. E.g., a search for Pad Thai in Atherton, CA yields no results. However, check out how easily you can look around in neighboring cities.
  
• Utility links: We have aggregated hundreds of thousands of useful links so you don’t have to go looking for restaurant discounts, online reservations, or menus. Try it yourself: reservations in Palo Alto, discounts in New York, online menus in Mountain View

What do you think? Tell us what you like or don’t like about our search.

In the past few weeks we have gotten a lot of concrete feedback on areas for improvement/features on our website. We have deployed a new release with the following major features/enhancements:

a) Mobile Support: You can now search our entire database of restaurants on your phone using a very simple and easy to use interface. For most of the phones, if you select http://www.boorah.com, you’ll be automatically redirected to the mobile site. Where we cannot detect the user-agent for your phone, please enter our mobile restaurant search website (http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/m). The search results are exactly the same as you’d get on the Web and you’ll also see a simple summary of the restaurant in addition to our ratings for the restaurant. Mobile is where sentiment extraction and summarization are extremely valuable and this is our first release.

Here are a few examples of queries that may be highly relevant on phone:

Pizza in Mission, San Francisco

sushi in 94123

indian at El Camino and Castro, Mountain View

The search results are sorted similar to what you’d get on the web at boorah.com. The following screen shots are simple 2 level drill down to get the details and additional information.The summary and ratings are generated by our patent-pending summary and scoring system.

The following details screen shows number of reviews, overall popularity (expressed as %Rah) and a system generated summary.

PS: We’re adding support for maps and directions soon.

b)Navigational Enhancements between City and Metro Landing Pages - We have made our navigation between metro and city pages simpler( atleast we think so). The metro pages primarily provide navigational help in selecting a city. Also, if someone wishes to search across an entire area ( one might consider doing that for special dining occasions), we still support the “best of searches” across the entire metro area.

We’ve also incorporated a simple map to aid in selecting our coverage or drill down to cities that may not necessarily be listed at the top. We were able to find a very flexible, configurable and versatile map from backspace.com.

c) Search and Other Minor Enhancements - We’ve now incorporated a new full-text search engine in the backend which gives us a big boost on the performance and scalability. We are also making other tweaks to ranking algorithms to improve the overall relevance and search quality. We have also optimized content and spacing on pages.

Check out our new features and let us know your feedback.

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.

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.

On the road?  Looking for a good place to grab a bite?  Simply SMS “boorah” + your search term to 4INFO (44636).  You’ll receive a SMS response with the top 3 restaurants matching your search criteria.  Unlike other SMS services, the results you see are based on the user popularity of restaurants across the web from reviews - consumer reviews, bloggers, and pros - not just for restaurants that pay to be listed.Sample SMS search terms:1.  boorah Palo Alto (returns top 3 restaurants in Palo Alto)2.  boorah lobster bisque San Francisco (returns top 3 restaurants with most positive references to lobster bisque)3.  boorah Mexican Mountain View, CA (returns top 2 Mexican restaurants in Mountain View)

You can now search right from your browser (IE7 and Firefox 2.0+ only) via the BooRah restaurant search plugin.  Download the plugin here.The BooRah search plugin is based on the OpenSearch standard.