Boorah has been quietly developing its local search engine based on the Natural Language Search(NLS) technology. We already have 2 well funded startups, Powerset and Phrasetrain, developing their search engines that use NLS concepts in the back-end. Co-founded by Eric Moyer and Nagaraju Bandaru, both of whom worked at MetroFi, Boorah wants to utilize its patent-pending NLS for subset of the local search world – restaurant search and reviews.
Boorah, which is still in alpha stage, currently aggregates restaurant reviews for Bay Area and enables users to search using regular phrases like “Best wine list in San Francisco”. Besides this you can always search by street & cross street, point of interest, cuisine, and tag. Boorah aggregates results both from sites like Yelp and individual user reviews of businesses by Boorah users itself. Since Boorah is still in alpha stage I will avoid writing about design and UI that does require lot of rework. Getting the local data to power the results will always be a challenge for a startup. Will really like to know how Boorah goes about that.
Powerreviews is another startup currently in private beta that enables search by customer review keywords, which I found to be very effective as compared to regular search or category browsing.
Links:
Boorah
February 19, 2007 at 11:19 pm |
[...] Semantic Web is the buzzword these days. TextDigger, Radar Networks, Boorah, PowerSet, Adaptive Blue are just some of the startups working on semantic web variations. Another semantic web contender Systemone today launched their first consumer facing Similarity Engine named Infolust. The initial launch is very basic. Right now all you can do is feed in the URL of a page for which you want more details, and Infolust will quickly analyze to come back with 10 related pages from Wikipedia. As I mentioned before the this is an alpha product so it is not yet ready for prime time. From the few search queries I ran, most of the results were way off track. So lot of work needs to done in that aspect, which even Systemone openly admits. Besides this, Systemone will be adding more content sources beyond the Wikipedia domain. Even if Systemone can get Wikipedia part working right, it will be big improvement over the standard Wikipedia search which is no one’s favorite. [...]
April 23, 2007 at 10:57 pm |
[...] I have already written couple of times about BooRah that enables local restaurant search via regular keyword search and also via Natural Language based Search(NLS) technique. The NLS part of things is going to come handy in this partnership ’cause users want to type in limited amount of text on the mobile to receive 3-4 highly relevant results. Something that is concise, and is in easy-to-read summary form right on their cell phones. In practice you would text strings in natural language like ’Date Place Palo Alto, CA’ to 4INFO to get 3-4 listings that have review “buzz” going on out on the Internet. I don’t think you would be one happy person if you have to read through 150 reviews from Yelp on your mobile browser. Instead let BooRah do the word crunching while your drive. [...]