“Boo” or “Rah?” BooRah – The Place to Get Your Restaurant Reviews

Not quite sure where to eat? Do you want to know what others think about a particular restaurant? Try BooRah! BooRah is a semantic and natural language processing aggregator of restaurant reviews. The service pulls in reviews from numerous review sites and a substantial list of restaurant review blogs, and then analyzes the emotional tone of the reviews it finds. Good reviews (”Rahs”) and bad reviews (”Boohs”) are collected concerning food, service, and ambience.

“BooRah is the ultimate, personalized review guide providing consumers a smarter way to find great restaurants. BooRah’s patent-pending natural language processing technology automatically summarizes a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers, and allows consumers to search based on personal preferences. By capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing the results to individual search criteria, BooRah delivers unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach…”

Now there are plenty of restaurant review sites out there, so it is imperative to stand out from the rest. How does BooRah do it? One thing is inside the review excerpt. You will find food terms, like a particular dish, identified and linked out to a search results page displaying that same item in the same location at which you are currently looking. If I am reading a review that says some place’s shrimp (my favorite) are alright but aren’t the best in town - I’m one click on the word shrimp away from finding out where in town is said to have better ones. I think a few other review sites my do this also; I just do not remember them being as simple.

The site searches for reviews across many different sources, depending on the location. CitySearch, Yahoo Travel, Tripadvisor and many many more are included. In some locations, even the local newspaper is a source. Now that they have the sources, reviews also need a personal touch. Reviews can also be written on the BooRah site itself. I am sure it is extremely hard for systems that scan reviews to recognize things like sarcasm or other peculiarities of human communication, but BooRah seems to do a decent job making a review objective instead of subjective.

BooRah is an impressive database of restaurant reviews from around the US, primarily focused on the nation’s large metropolitan areas. I was able to find good reviews in my smaller town however. Your first visit to BooRah can be a little overwhelming. There is information everywhere crammed, on what seems like, one page. Of course, this can quickly be solved by narrowing your search. Once you have found the restaurant, it’ll even show where it is using Google Maps!

Other than the easily fixable quirks, I really love BooRah. It is informative, simple, and fun. Not to mention, if you direct your mobile browser to BooRah.com, you will be taken to the mobile version (currently in Alpha) and able to search on the go. Pretty cool.

So what are you waiting for? After looking up your local “Rahs,” go ahead and take your family out to eat making it another “Rah” in their book.