Are you like me? Have you ever been frustrated with MenuPages.com or CitySearch? I don't think many people would disagree that there isn't a single food directory repository on the Internet that is unbiased, reliable and anywhere close to comprehensive. I'd like to propose "Chowgle" as a solution to people like me who love to visit new places solely for the purpose of trying the best local fare. I'd like to be able to enter the search term "Boston's Best Burrito" and see "Anna's Tacqueria" as the top result or "Fair Lawn pizza" and see "John's Pizza" as the top result. Kudos to the braniancs who purchased other domain names I would have chosen including Foodgle and Chewgle.
Chowgle will be sort of a hybrid of three existing Google products; Google local search, Google News and Froogle. It will thrive off user submitted content and have an intelligent contextual search tool.
There are three main principles which Chowgle should follow:
1. Chowgle will accept restaurant menus as XML feeds and spreadsheet uploads directly from restaurants (similar to the methodology used to upload product listings to Froogle.) This task will be fairly easy for restaurants, especially ones with websites that show their menus already. In addition to restaurant submitted menus it would be interesting to see if some kind of restaurant website crawler could accurately compile menus.
2. Chowgle will use a ranking algorithm, "FoodRank", to rank search results. Similar to Google the public won't be privy to the details of how FoodRank works but some kind of combination of user submitted reviews, food blog reviews (e.g. Burrito Blog), Zagat ratings etc...
3. Chowgle will of course will use contextual search and suggestions (Ajax) like Google search.
I proposed this idea to Google as a business venture last week. As of March 13th I haven't heard back. I'm guessing I'll hear back any day now!
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