BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Time.com announced it’s 50 Best Websites for 2008 earlier this week. Even though we didn’t quite make it to the list, we’re thrilled to have received a mention in their evaluation. We know we have a few things to fix to hit the next level of usability for consumers and are working diligently within our constraints to provide a very valuable service. Many thanks to Anita Hamilton.

Last week Peggy Anne Salz also did a very extensive piece about our mobile application on msearchgroove.com. Her perspective on blending social recommendations and semantic search is quite creative and we’re definitely looking into enhancing features in that direction.

WapReview.com also wrote a review about our mobile service and we are humbled by Dennis’ evaluation.

As always, we look forward to valuable feedback from you in building a service that you’ll love.

Restaurant Hospitality Magazine writes about some tactics that restaurant owners could start to use to try to strike back against negative reviews/comments about their restaurant on the web:

“You’ve had to put up with the zero-accountability blogging phenomenon for years. But now a new option has emerged: you can hire an independent, third-party company to manage your online reputation. Their promise: No matter what a disgruntled customer, former employee or competitor posts about your restaurant, the online reputation management company will make it difficult for potential customers to find those negative references on the web.”

We here at BooRah have certainly heard our share of complaints about all the “drive-by” restaurant reviewers out there.   For example, in response to a question posed to panelists at the recent Restaurant Bootcamp here in San Francisco - “Q: What’s the biggest challenge to starting a restaurant?” the answer was a single word: “Yelp”.

So, as a service for restaurateurs, we’ve recently introduced a free service - Track Your Restaurant Reviews. Once you sign up, if your restaurant gets a review written about it, we’ll let you know.

While we don’t condone sketchy tactics like trying to “hide” reviews — in fact, we do our best to provide a cross-source, objective look at all restaurant reviews — what you do next is your business.

I was walking by Castro street yesterday and came by this new place which is set to open soon. Looks like a great place, can’t wait to add to our list and try it out.

Diyar Bistro  & Wine Bar

Forbes magazine ran a recent article on the top “power lunch” spots in the US. With links to their BooRah profiles, here they are:

- Michael’s, Manhattan (favorite of Ronald Perelman, Les Moonves signed Katie Couric there, Warren Buffet forged charity lunches idea there)

- The Palm, Morton’s, Charlie Palmer Steak and The Capital Grille in Washington, DC (steakhouses are favorites as “safe”, “macho” places among the politicos)

- Prime Blue Grille in Miami (real estate developer George Perez’s hangout)

- Craft in LA (due to its proximity to Creative Artists Agency)

- And of course there’s Denny’s in South San Francisco (where anonimity was preferred by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen meeting with Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt)

Where are your favorite power lunch places?

We launched features to manage restaurants recently and it’s interesting note that restaurants like to link back to their profile pages on boorah for engagement. It’s an interesting eco-system of deriving credibility from cross linked sites. Check one of our restaurant partners Opus italian Restaurant.

BooRah today launched our service in two new major metro areas,
continuing the expansion of our automatically-generated summaries, detailed
ratings, menus, photographs, restaurant discounts and coupons, keyword
searches and other relevant restaurant information compiled from
hundreds of sources on the Internet.

Like our previously launched services, we bring advanced search features that let people easily
find popular and hard-to-find features alike, including restaurants participating in Denver’s current "Restaurant Week" and restaurants in San Diego serving "great seafood".

If you live in one of these metros, or are traveling there soon,
check it out!  And as always, we rely on our users to improve our
service — so let us know any suggestions for improvement.

BooRah today launched our service in four new major metro areas, greatly expanding our automatically-generated summaries, detailed ratings, menus, photographs, restaurant discounts and coupons, keyword searches and other relevant restaurant information compiled from hundreds of sources on the Internet.

Like our previously launched service in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, we bring advanced search features that let people easily find popular and hard-to-find features alike, including great "ribs" in Atlanta, "clam chowder" in Boston, "great seafood" in Seattle and "italian beef" in Chicago.

If you live in one of these metros, or are traveling there soon, check it out!  And as always, we rely on our users to improve our service — so let us know any suggestions for improvement.

As the Victoria’s Secret advertisement on the Superbowl reminded us - once the football game is over, where are you going to take your sweetie for Valentine’s Day dinner?  (Ok, well that wasn’t EXACTLY the message…)  In any case, if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, BooRah has compiled a list for you, based on user suggestions - you can see the list here.

If you’d like to add your own Valentine’s day restaurant recommendations to this list, simply find the restaurant on BooRah, and add the tag "Valentine" to it.  This automatically adds it to the list. 

And if you’re not in San Francisco, you can start a list of recommendations by "tag"-ging your favorite suggestions the same way.

Enjoy!

Here at BooRah, we’re all about showing consumers what everyone is saying about local restaurants from across the Internet.  Now, we’ve added two features specifically for the restaurant owner’s benefit - track your reviews, and promote your restaurant.  And they’re both absolutely FREE.

Track your Reviews — When you sign up for an account on BooRah as the owner of a restaurant, we’ll keep track of all the reviews about your restaurant, and send you an email when we find that someone has written a new review, anywhere on the Internet.  So you’ll know right away what your customers think about your restaurant, delivered directly to your in-box.

Promote your Restaurant — Signing up as a restaurant owner on BooRah also means you can post your own information about your restaurant.  You can add a short description of your restaurant, upload photographs, upload menus, highlight special offers, and more — increasing the "attractiveness" of your restaurant on BooRah, and increasing the likelihood that an Internet surfer will decide to come in to your restaurant.

To get started, all you need to do is search for your restaurant from www.boorah.com, then click on the link:   "Are you the restaurant owner or manager?  Click here to get involved."

And Jimmy’s Diner in Brooklyn
is the first restaurant to take advantage of our new services.  Check
out his page (he added a description, pictures, and menus), and if you live nearby, stop in and have lunch, and tell
him you heard about him on BooRah.

USAToday ran an article a couple days ago where they solicited Zagat for 2 restaurants in 10 cities that were good, quality "cheap eats" places.  We wanted to tell you about some more –

Some personal favorites here in the SF Bay Area are:
- Pluto’s, with locations in SF (2), Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and San Jose - see http://tinyurl.com/35oy7b
- Andale Taqueria, with locations in SF, SFO, Palo Alto, and Los Gatos - see http://tinyurl.com/3yx3rh

Here’s some other ‘cheap eats’ in NYC, LA and SF - based on BooRah’s algorithms:

SF Bay Area - http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/t/156/CA/San-Francisco/1988/Cheap-Eats.html
LA Metro - http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/t/LA/1988/Cheap-Eats.html
NYC - http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/t/2126/NY/New-York/1988/Cheap-Eats.html

What are some of yours?