Discovering what to eat and where to get it just got a whole lot easier. I spent some time testing a new site called DishTip. DishTip lets users search for specific dishes, flavors, ingredients, cuisines, restaurants… you name it.

Here are my top three observations:

1. Getting Specific Dish Recommendations is Very Cool
   Normally, when I would use the web to find a place to eat, I would turn to some well known sites that rank restaurants. But, I had to really dig through mounds and mounds of user reviews and try to pick out comments about specific dishes. With DishTip, I love the fact that regardless of my search criteria; the site provides me with specific dish recommendations.

   There is a ‘Restaurant View’ tab that will sort results by restaurant, but I personally like viewing the specific dish results.

2. Filtering Results Gets You More Personalized Results
   I conducted a search for the best seafood dishes in New York City. The results included everything from Lobster rolls and Crab cakes to Porcini flan with dungeness crab. Since I ate at a Japanese restaurant the night before, I knew I wanted something that was not at another Japanese restaurant. With the filters on Dishtip, I could easily filter out dishes that are served at Japanese restaurants.  I have not seen any site or search engine that allowed such control.

1. Semantic Technology Has Come a Long Way
   Initially, I assumed that the content on DishTip was entered by DishTip users – just like most other sites.  But, after reading a little more about the company and the technology, I was amazed that the content on Dishtip is produced using machine intelligence.  Dishtip collects data from all over the web, aggregates, analyzes and then displays it in a fashion that gets me the results I am looking for.

   Imagine a restaurant review about a Peruvian restaurant in San Francisco.  Somewhere within that review, the writer mentions how flavorful the chicken was.

   Dishtip’s technology actually dives into the content, finds key words, searches for corresponding images and creates a review on the actual dish – even though the original review was only on the restaurant!

I think DishTip’s approach will pay off.  There is so much unstructured content on the web and someone needs to build technology to make all that content useful and relevant. DishTip is a perfect example of how technology can really harness all that content and deliver it in a way that is very user friendly.