boorah

Know your neighborhood: Thirteen sites

Whether you're moving to a new place or you just want to be more familiar with your surroundings, there are a variety of sites on the Web that fill you in on everything from restaurants to businesses to apartments in your area.

Find some businesses

BooRah If you're only looking for restaurants, BooRah is for you. The site features information on how to get to a restaurant, but really shines when you read through the informative reviews from users and consider the "similar restaurant" tab, which features a listing of local eateries that are similar to … Read more

BooRah launches API to share restaurant reviews

BooRah, a service that uses semantic technology to find restaurant reviews online and combine them to give users a rating, announced that it has launched a new API for websites and businesses that want to display the company's reviews on their own sites.

The API allows users to search for restaurants in their city and view the detailed ratings for food, service, and ambiance that have already been generated on BooRah. The API will also give its users the option of displaying links for discounts, menus, and coupons. BooRah hopes users will employ the API's location capabilities to … Read more

Boorah "Zagatizes" restaurant reviews from the Web

Boorah, a new restaurant reviews site, scrapes the Web for criticism and generates Zagat-style evaluations. (Lawsuits are sure to follow.)

Unlike Zagat, which has its own volunteer army of reviewers, Boorah scours reviews from sites like Insider Pages, SFGate, and blogs, and extracts content from them. The site parses all the data and assigns scores for food, ambiance, and service for each restaurant.

The site has a relationship with OpenTable (my favorite Web site ever) and will let you make direct reservations for restaurants that take them.

What I liked about Boorah: it has a very good search engine, … Read more