Mountain View-based Boorah, which launched at last year’s DEMO conference, is a site I recently learned about that aims to garner a community around restaurant reviews in major cities. The site follows the concept of Yelp and a number of new startups aiming at building a community around the local market.
Supporting most cities in America, as a user (or searcher — looking for restaurant reviews) — there a number of ways you can use the site. Of course, being a contender in the local space, the site is organized by cities and regions. You can click through one — for example San Francisco — and a page is presented with the latest restaurant reviews in the area, pictures of restaurants, top rated restaurants, most popular cuisines, discounts, among more. Needless to say, if you’re looking to discover restaurants in your city, the Boorah page should contain everything on your city’s page.
Another way to use Boorah is through it’s search functionality. You can search by category/theme/keyword () and by Neighborhood, City, Zip, or Address, and up come results that are organized by recommendations, buzz and ratings (of course, relevancy is a minor factor in the local search game.) This immensely useful, and I think is what makes sites like Boorah shine — for example, I was able to discover the 10 best Pizza restaurants in San Francisco just by searching through it.
A Boorah representative, Sanjay Chakraborti, alerted me about some impressive milestones they crossed recently:
- 1,000,000 Restaurant Reviews
- 225,000 Restaurants
- 45,000 Restaurant Menus
- 30,000 Restaurant Pictures
- 6,000 Discount coupons for various restaurants
- 4,000 Restaurants with Online Reservation capability
Unlike Yelp, what I like about Boorah is that they’re aiming for a niche, yet hefty market, and do a great job of serving that, as opposed to chasing others. So the next time you’re looking to go for a romantic dinner with your girl friend, use Boorah!
