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Top Restaurant Blogs Ranked
March 20, 2008
Many foodie bloggers contribute invaluable content about restaurants for consumers to explore new tastes. If you happen to search for restaurants in Yahoo or Google, you are likely to come across CitySearch, or Yelp and sometimes, BooRah . However, blogs offer a wealth of information that one cannot glean off of review sites. By way of descriptive narratives and gorgeous pictures, they encourage you to try new dishes and discover new local favorites.. There are 1000’s of foodie bloggers across the country who dedicate their time and effort to bring out the “best restaurants” for the communities they live in/dine around. At BooRah, we thrive on featuring the best content across the Internet. Our mission is to help people make the best dining decisions as well as bring visibility to all reviewers including bloggers who contribute in modestly small numbers but make up a big chunk of the long tail of restaurant content on the Internet. So with the introduction of our new blog analysis platform(still in alpha) , here’s our initial top 100 restaurant blogger list.

E.g., take Anna Haight of mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com, who describes restaurants in a wonderfully pleasant way with great pictures of food that seem to make you hungry instantly. We have counted 91 different blog posts, 29 of which we could associate with restaurants in our database with many many pictures to see and explore. Imagine the richness of all this content at your disposal. Similarly ChristianZ and PleasurePalate create invaluable content for locations around Los Angeles that are otherwise starved for great content. One of such foodie blogs will help you find a dinner to delight the palate.

I’ve listed the top 25 blogs here:

1. mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com - Anna Haight
2. ocmexfood.blogspot.com - ChristianZ
3. pleasurepalate.blogspot.com - pleasurepalate
4. foodandthings.blogspot.com - Food and Things
5. foodhoe.wordpress.com - foodhoe
6. kikimaraschino.blogspot.com - Kiki Maraschino
7. foodieuniverse.blogspot.com - Foodie Universe
8. what2order.blogspot.com - kewlio
9. elmomonster.blogspot.com - elmomonster
10. 52flavorsnyc.blogspot.com - Jen
11. bayfood.blogspot.com - Lucie
12. eateryrow.blogspot.com - Jon Parker
13. jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com - Jo <-Me!!
14. sgcuizine.blogspot.com - Sharona
15. sisterswhoeat.blogspot.com - sister#2
16. dinerwood.blogspot.com - Mike “Pie is a Food not a Number” Tanner
17. wtle-new-york.blogspot.com - Admin
18. aki-eats.blogspot.com - aki
19. tastetests.blogspot.com - taste tester
20. foodmakesmehappy.blogspot.com - Cindy. Lo.
21. hiddennewyork.blogspot.com - Marc
22. chungfood.blogspot.com - David
23. finechina.wordpress.com - finechina
24. umamimart.blogspot.com - kayoko
25. wtle-miami.blogspot.com - Admin

Here’s a plain English explanation of our algorithm that is used to compute the rankings. We process over 100,000 blogs and identify which of those blogs have content related to restaurants. When we process an individual blog entry from a blogger, our semantic entity-mapper looks for information that can help us associate the blog post with one of the known restaurants in our database. In many cases an address or phone number or both will help but we can also associate through fuzzy, natural language entity mapping. To explain further, here’s a blog post about restaurant Kowloon in Saugus. Our semantic extraction identifies Kowloon as a restaurant and Saugus as a place and associates them together and looks for restaurants that match the criteria.

Once the association has happened, the ranking algorithm is a straight tally of all the reviewed restaurants by any blogger. Additional points are awarded to blogs with pictures (which is an indication of the quality of the content). We also extract boos & rahs from the content to identify the sentiment expressed by the author.

If there are bugs that any of you can identify with entity association or missing mappings - let us know and we’ll correct any bugs as soon as possible. Also, in future, if you could add additional restaurant details such as name, address and phone in the blog, it would be easy to associate your content with a restaurant and provide attribution and credit to your post.

Note: If your blog is missing in our database, let us know and we’ll investigate.

Posted by Nagaraju Bandaru at 9:27am
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