Boorah - that word just reminds me of boorish
Posted by Ahmed as Local Search at 11:05 AM EST 31/01/2007So today (last night for me) Boorah launched, a site I had recently pointed out was cached all over Google and had its blog broken. We don’t see many (credible) local search sites launched anymore, so lets take a gander with some few thoughts:
- The design is ugly. If it was slightly uglier, you could give Craigslist a run for that money
- Clicking on basic search brought me to this page - huh?
- Having never lived in NYC or SF, I am unfortunately unable to ascertain the strength of its results …
- The assortment of reviews is pretty cool. I do *not* like how they use redirect links (dammit if you are going to essentially lift content, give it a damn direct link). It also makes no sense how they are ordering the reviews - definitely not based on date.
- Because they give no breakdown of information on the reviews, their overall rankings for food, ambiance, and service could be made up. No proof, not good enough.
- The design is seriously horrible. I say this after clicking on add tags - the inline dialog box looks like its from Mac OS X. Someone point them to 37signals asap-like.
- The Buzz is really just # of reviews. Why call it Buzz?
- Whats open now is busted for me. It showed places opening up at noon in SF (and one hour ahead of SF, it is 8:57 am locally).
- The smart search is cool but busted. Searching for ‘open kitchen’ brought in results for lively also. Clicking on the links didn’t work - dead links.
- ‘People who liked this restaurant also liked …’ is pretty damn cool. Again, since I don’t know these places, I cannot reflect on its accuracy.
- The speed of search (which matters a lot to me) is too slow.
- The ‘blog link’ on the bottom goes to http://www.boorah.com/blog/. How about someone do some cleanup and point the other two blog URLs to the correct one.
I like the idea, but I am not impressed with the execution. Too many odd bugs - if I found all those in 20 minutes, they need a QA team (or a QA part-time-person) asap.
My feeling? A tech play that will try to get snapped up like OpenList.
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2 Responses to: Boorah - that word just reminds me of boorish
Mike Bogo (newbie)
January 31st, 2007 at 2:05 pm
1
So you convinced me to check out the site - how could something be so bad and “launched”? In the days of everlasting beta, how can you possibly launch a site that doesn’t even function?
Having been to new york, and being a fan of a pizza place called John’s, I decided to check it out. Searching both by zip code and “new york city” as the address, I ended up results from connecticut and california - none from new york. Additionally, when clicking on restaurants named “John’s Pizzeria,” I ended up at pages for Papa John’s restaurants.
Then I decided, hey, I live in a pretty decent sized city, and it happens to be a state capital too. So I do a search for restaurants in Providence - and it asks “Did you mean New Providence, NJ?” Ack. NO. Why is a city of 11,000 people listed and not a city of 200,000?
Hrmm… My vote: BUSTED.
Ahmed (l337)
January 31st, 2007 at 2:33 pm
2
Ouch.
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