BooRah - Inside the Buzz

We all have had our share of interesting experiences while eating out. Share a fun story about your restaurant experience and enter to win a $75 Gift card. Here’s one for starters:

A few of us (some colleagues were traveling on business) once visited this popular thai restaurant. As we got to the restaurant, we realized that we all had to sit on raised bamboo floor and take our shoes off. Quite a predicament! One of the gals refused to take her shoes off, turns out she hadn’t changed her socks in a few days and was concerned they’d smell. Finally, after much convincing, she agreed to take the socks off as well and sat little farther away from group with her feet spread outward. As we were ready to leave, some one from the adjacent table approached her, chatted for a few mins and handed her his business card. As luck would have it, the guy was a footwear designer and wanted to cast her in a footwear commercial! We all just couldn’t help but giggle and laugh at the whole situation when we found out about it later.

Now that may be an unusual story, but we’re sure some of you have some interesting aspects to share with us. Here are a few themes to trigger your memory :

• Romantic date(s)
• Family parties/get togethers
• Business meals or trips out of town
• Restaurants in your neighborhood that you hadn’t discovered in a decade
• Interesting ordering situations

So, just jot down a few quick comments from your experience in response to this blog and you’re entered to win $75 Gift Card.

We’ll award the gift card to the best story (in our sole determination) posted in the comments to this blog by the end of the day on June 18.  Please be sure to include your email address.

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.

Here are two search queries that I’ve been pointed to, that deliver great relevance on BooRah.

• Restaurants with Great View in San Francisco
• Restaurants that serve Idly Sambar near 110 Rio Robles, San Jose

For the “great view in San Francisco” search, the results were really good, but what amazed me was the accompanying map that lends credibility to the results.

The second search is something that I’d do often but have not tried it until now. Idli Sambar is a south indian breakfast, snack, appetizer item that is a very frequently ordered at a south Indian restaurant. Not only are the results on the attached screen right on, but if you search for other options beyond the 5 mile radius( idli sambar beyond san jose), you get the complete list of places for you to choose from, which is perfect (atleast for Shrisha and my tastes).

What are your favorite searches on BooRah?

The past week was a good week for us. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an indepth analysis of his BooRah experience in his article on ReadWriteWeb here. We are thrilled that he liked our technology and service. Matt Murphy also wrote a very comprehensive piece on EmilyChang.com and explains his navigational experience and various aspects of technology he likes. Mashable.com’s Review about BooRah also had very good things to say about our content and service. We are very excited about the positive reviews but realize that we need to make a lot of progress and keep up the steady focus to improve the quality and performance of our service. There was also a great deal of feedback in various forums and discussion boards about pros/cons of BooRah service. We appreciate all the comments.

We are working on enhancing our site navigation, reducing clutter on various webpages, optimizing google ads, and improving the search relevance. We are also working on mobile support. User Interaction and Design is an area that needs to be improved quite a bit but we’re focused on making the service right for now.

On friday, I was also invited to be on a digital culinary panel comprising of Chow.com, Gayot and FoodBuzz for their first New Media Taste Makers Event hosted by TasteTV. Thanks to A.K. Crump and TasteTV crew for a very informative and well organized event.(Picture by Alicia Lin of Mashable)

CNN has an interesting post about restaurant etiquette.

Interesting tips and suggestions in the post are:

• Call restaurant if you’re more than 15 minutes late for reservation
• Tell hostess before sitting if you’re unhappy with table
• If service was bad, talk to management about automatic gratuity
• If you can’t eat entrees, make meal of hors d’oeuvres, side dishes

Check it out.

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.

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.