WapReview

BooRah is crowd-sourced restaurant review site along the lines of Yelp (review) or Zagat (review) but with a couple of differences. First, instead of relying only it's own members to build up a critical mass of reviews, BooRah pulls in reviews from other sites like CitySearch, Insider Pages and Yahoo Reviews. The other difference is that BooRah ignores the scores and star ratings in these reviews. Instead it performs a structural and semantic analysis of the review text and extracts whether the reviewer is expressing a negative (Boo) or positive (Rah) feeling on three specific aspects of the dinning experience; service, ambiance and food. A restaurant's Boos and Rahs are used to create an overall percentage rating and separate ratings in each category. There's a good interview of BooRah co-founder and CTO Nagaraju Bandaru by Peggy Anne Salz at mSearchGroove where he explains BooRah's methodology in more detail.

Bandaru stresses that the site still Alpha and that there is still some missing functionality but I think it's actually pretty good. I tried a few searches for specific restaurants and found BooRah useful. Unlike Yelp, Boorah seems very good at accurately locating the closest restaurants to a specific address, zip code or intersection. It found over a dozen of sushi places within 3 miles of my house. BooRah reviews tend to be somewhat dry and factual ... More