Useful local search sites, Boorah and SuggestLocal
Boorah and SuggestLocal are two new useful local search sites worth a look. — Boorah provides a clean, elegant search for restaurants by city, ranking them by the quality of reviews and other mentions they get from around the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
This roundup lands four days after the Ask.com blog sketched what it called the new shape of local search, and it reads as a field report from that shift: instead of one big portal, a crop of small sites attacking local from narrow angles.
Boorah is the more interesting of the two because of how it ranks — not by its own user reviews, which a startup has none of, but by the quality of mentions restaurants earn across the wider web. That decouples local ranking from owning a review community, which is exactly the constraint a new entrant would need to route around. SuggestLocal is flagged as a lighter-weight discovery play worth a look.
First-order effects
- Boorah's launch hands restaurants a new visibility lever that exists outside any single site: praise scattered across blogs and small publications now aggregates into ranking position, rewarding businesses already discussed around the web.
- City-level restaurant searchers get a quality-ranked shortlist without having to join or trust one particular review community's base of users.
Second-order effects
- Sites whose value rests on being the sole home of reviews face a new kind of rival that treats their content as just one input among many — the incentive to keep reviews exclusive rather than openly crawlable tightens.
- SuggestLocal appearing alongside Boorah suggests the cost of launching a credible city-by-city local site has dropped enough that the category should crowd quickly through 2007, forcing differentiation on ranking method rather than coverage.
Third-order effects
- If mention-aggregation ranking proves durable, local search structurally splits in two: directory-style portals holding structured listings, and reputation scorers that index the open web's opinions — with the scorers able to rank from day one, a structural edge over any community that must grow its own reviews.
- The pattern also points toward review content becoming contested infrastructure: whoever ranks on top of everyone else's writing captures the traffic, raising the stakes over whether those underlying sources get credited, licensed, or locked down.
The trend: Local search is splitting away from monolithic directories toward specialized entrants that rank businesses by aggregating reputational signals from across the web.