Intuit has purchased BooRah, a ratings and review site, and will add its functionality to the Intuit small business platform, which has also incorporated the old StepUp ecommerce site and Homestead website construction services. The companies aren’t talking much about the deal, which closed yesterday.
BooRah recently changed strategy, moving away from a reliance on powering alternative weeklies and towards building up its own site, and syndicating its content. InfoUSA and Kosmix.com, for instance, have integrated BooRah reviews into their offerings.
The company has also been adding promotional offers in the form of contextual ads from Entertainment.com, ValPak and Restaurant.com. Recently, it also unveiled a restaurant reputation package, which charged restaurants $14.95 to find reviews and manage responses, and added smart phone access as well. The site has been serving 35 metro areas, including 14 that have been recently launched.
It can be said that BooRah pioneered semantic evaluations of whether reviews are positive or negative, and then counting up “votes.” But the semantic review field has become a crowded one recently, with such entrants as Marchex’s OpenList and UrbanSpoon. All of them compete against mass sites such as Citysearch and Yelp.
(Thanks to Screenwerk for pointing out the BooRah announcement).