Something Nice to Start The Day: BooRah

Stacey Higginbotham | Thursday, May 29, 2008 | 6:43 AM PT | 4 comments

BooRah, a semantic vertical search engine founded by former MetroFi employees, has indexed 100,000 blogs and over 100 review sites to create a nice restaurant review and search service for a variety of U.S. cities. Today, the Mountain View, Calif., company launched a partnership with online reservation agent BookingAngel that will allow folks to make online reservations with any California restaurant through the BooRah site.

There’s a lot to like about this startup — namely that it already has revenue from signing ad partnerships with 20 local newspapers — but also because Co-founder and CTO Nagaraju Bandaru wants to give back to the community.

He’s not talking about building houses in New Orleans, though. He’s giving back to the technical community through open sourcing some of BooRah’s entity mapping code, which analyzes semantic relationships on web sites and determines what type of business operates that site. As he explains, “We do a lot of stuff on MySQL that before would have cost us millions in Oracle databases, and $50,000 a year in fees, but we can now start a company for much less.”

So in a few months he plans to open source that code for other startups to use. Other than making me feel all warm and fuzzy about entrepreneurs sticking together, such efforts will only hasten technological innovation for end users. Even if BooRah doesn’t make it (although, given Bandaru’s efforts so far to get both advertisers on board and provide a premium service for restaurateurs, I think it has a good chance), its technology could enable another startup to quickly get up and running with a different use for that code.

4 comments so far

May 29th, 2008
8:02 AM PT
Ben said:

With a company name like that they are sure to succeed! BooRah is what caught my attention to this blog in the first place.

I think it is very cool that they are opening up the code as much as they are. With all the open source going around it makes it a ton easier to write software and get other new and innovative ideas off the ground!

May 29th, 2008
2:40 PM PT
spero lucem said:

Very nice service w/ real value proposition. Like adaptiveblue, great example of ‘bottoms-up approach’ using semantic technology. Big fan and can’t wait to see the tech move into other verticals.

May 30th, 2008
12:49 AM PT
Mike said:

Great idea and website. Boorah is starting to make a lot of noise in this area and will only continue to advance and take market share away from Yelp. Boorah’s natural search function is something that is missing from Yelp.

May 30th, 2008
4:45 AM PT
Sirah said:

Simple and great system, rightly poised for the future web. Liked the idea of giving back, as open sourcing some of the codes will help startups gain momentum.

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