Boorah - natural phrased local search

By Vivek | December 28th, 2006 at 11:55 pm ET         

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