RetailerSelect & Local Searching

May 04, 2008 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  1 comment

Vinquire has added a new feature and we wanted you to be the first to know. Our new RetailerSelect option allows you to perform a "local search" of the wine retailers in your neighborhood only, to help you find that great bottle much closer to home.



It's simple to use: enter the name of the wine into the search field (as you've always done), but now, by selecting "Local Retailers", you can enter your zip code and a maximum distance to limit the results to wines near your home. Additionally, Vinquire displays the results on Google Maps^TM, so you can easily see where they are located and how to get there.

Here's an example search for "Beringer Private Reserve" in San Francisco, CA.

Why We Love "Local" Searching

How many times have you found a great deal searching a wine, only to discover that the retailer is nowhere near you? Now our new "local search" feature can help you avoid the hassles of long distance ordering:

• Exorbitant shipping prices (especially for small purchases)
• Retailers that won't ship long distance
• Waiting a week (or longer) for UPS to deliver that bottle that you needed NOW
• Warm weather risks. Depending on the time of year, it may not be the best climate for shipping high-end bottles around the country.

Finding Local Retailers

We've also added a "Find Retailers" section to the website to help you locate retailers in your area. Once you've selected a retailer, you can click to search only their inventory to see what the store has available before you visit.

Happy Hunting

Call it what you will...we've got buzz words like "geographical awareness," "vicinity based," and "proximity search enabled" — but at the end of the day, we think it's just plain cool. We hope you enjoy the new features!

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Find Good Wines in the Neighborhood

Apr 29, 2008 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates, Press Releases |  1 comment

Press Release:

Find Good Wines in the Neighborhood

Vinquire's new search feature helps wine lovers find retailers in their area.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 29, 2008 — Visitors to Vinquire.com can now search for wine at retailers and wineries as close as a mile from their living rooms. The new local search functionality enables users to enter their Zip Code, along with the wine they wish to locate, and find bottles in their immediate vicinity. The new search technology helps avoid expensive wine shipping costs.

Additionally, nearby wines are charted via Google Maps™ for easy navigation. By selecting a retailer in the list, visitors can find driving directions, contact information, or a link to the retailer's website. Now visitors not only have the ability to find the wine they want, but find the bottle with the shortest route from the store to the dinner table.

Additionally, the site features a "Find Retailers" tab which includes the option of searching for wines at a specific retailer only -- a helpful tool for those with a local store in mind. Users with a free Vinquire account can also create a list of their Favorite Retailers, and limit their searches to wines available at those locations exclusively. These powerful features enable users to find wines that are available for pickup immediately.

Unlike other wine search engines, Vinquire displays all wine search results available every time, regardless of site sponsors. In addition, the search engine is constantly updated with fresh wine inventory data via Vinquire's proprietary web crawling technology.

About Vinquire.com
Vinquire.com is a free search engine for wine enthusiasts. Based in San Francisco, CA, Vinquire maintains a database of over 1,000,000 wines to help users find, review and buy wine. For more information, visit http://www.vinquire.com/.

News & Updates, Press Releases

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Vinquire.com launches free comprehensive wine search engine

Nov 06, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates, Press Releases |  0 comments

Press Release:

Find The Best Wine Deals Online

Vinquire.com launches free comprehensive wine search engine.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) November 6, 2007 — Vinquire.com, a San Francisco based wine portal, today unveils a free wine search engine enabling users to search for wines at over 3,300 U.S. wineries and retailers. Vinquire inventories over 500,000 wines and offers users the ability to find virtually any wine at competitive prices.

Unlike other wine search engines, Vinquire displays all wine search results available every time, regardless of site sponsorships. In addition, the search engine is constantly updated with fresh wine inventory data via Vinquire's proprietary web crawling technology. And, much like Google™ search, users can employ advanced requests to fine tune results.

Vinquire also offers social networking features enabling users to submit wine reviews, participate in forum discussions, and receive wine recommendations that are based entirely on other users' reviews. Additionally, the site is able to deliver customizable wine recommendations which can be optionally limited to wines available at chain stores such as BevMo, Albertsons, and Trader Joe's.

Vinquire is the first wine site that merges both a powerful wine pricing search engine with community-centric features. This enables Vinquire to not only deliver recommendations based on user-reviewed wines, but also help users find those bottles at the best prices. Based in San Francisco, CA, John Kleven and Andy Hund founded Vinquire in late 2005 and the site officially launched in 2007.

The search is available now at Vinquire.com.

About Vinquire.com
Vinquire.com is a free wine search engine that enables users to find the best prices on wine. Based in San Francisco, CA, Vinquire maintains information on over 500,000 wines and allows users to search for, discuss, and review wines. For more information, visit www.vinquire.com.

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Pictures & Profiles

Oct 26, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

Another site update, hot of the presses from the wee hours of Friday morning. Per usual, our search results should be even better. Secondly (and this is really cool), users can now upload a picture of themselves that will be displayed next to their reviews -- lets get some faces to go with those names!

Additionally, each user now has a public profile; a page which displays your reviews and your karma for the rest of the world to see. Now you can see what other users have been reviewing, and maybe even find a tasting buddy with a similar palate. There are also new city and zip code fields in your profile, as well as some controls to limit what information is publicly displayed.

As always, if you find bugs or need help using a feature, please don't hesitate to contact us and tell us what we can do better. Thanks for using Vinquire and enjoy.

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New Beta Release

Oct 03, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

As you may have noticed, Vinquire.com got a facelift! And along with our simple, easy-to-use feel, we offer what we think is an even easier way to search the largest wine price comparison database on the internet. You can now:

Find more wines smarter

Our AI now condenses down wine name variations to bring you what you want cleaner. And you're still able to find the bottle you want at the best price.

Vote review helpfulness

Users can weigh in on how useful other reviewers' comments have been. Maybe you'll find a reviewer you agree with, or not. These votes contribute to a wine's WineRank and affect Vinquire's wine recommendations.

And here's a little horn-tooting. Did you know that Vinquire crawls and indexes over 4 million wine retailer pages? And that we search constantly in order to deliver the most current, up-to-date wine prices? It’s just another way that Vinquire is bringing our users the best way to find, review, and buy wine ... for free!

Post your comments now, and thanks as always for using Vinquire.com.

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Update 8/16/2007

Aug 16, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

We completed a fairly large update of Vinquire.com late last night. The highlights include:

Edit your wine reviews

After many requests, the users have finally prevailed. You can now edit any of the wine reviews you've submitted, from either your My Reviews area, or the wine detail page where you entered them.

Two new areas of the site, "Buy" and "Review"

On previous versions we had these areas merged into one, however, if you're really going to buy a wine and want to find the best price, the "combo search" was not ideal.

• With the new "Buy" tab, you should always be able to find a bottle you want to purchase at the best price available. Search results on this tab are sorted by price to help accomplish this.
• Likewise, if you're looking to review a wine, or find reviews related to a wine, the new "Review" tab is where you should click. On this page we no longer show wines for sale, but we do show review specific information.

Wine database update

Our AI (which finds the wines for sale) was updated, which means our search engine is smarter than ever. The search results on the "Buy" tab should be rock solid, we will find you that bottle at the best price, every time.

Let us know what you think, and thanks for taking the time to check out Vinquire.com.

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Josh Spear "digs" Vinquire

Jun 08, 2007 |  John (12) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

The nice people at JoshSpear.com did a write-up on Vinquire.com and that made our Friday all the better.

David Vo did an outstanding job at detailing our site: a place where both a wine search engine and user reviews combine to form a wine portal that is actually useful. I won't toot our own horn too much, take a look at their review and see if you agree.

David is an enthusiastic blogger who (quite unabashedly) lays his opinion out there for the world to see. He's also got his own blog at Sygyzy.com, so if you're feeling adventurous, cruise on over and check out his take on life.

Thanks David and JoshSpear.com for taking note.

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Karma Police

Apr 12, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

In order to ensure proper WineRankings throughout Vinquire's wine review database we've introduced a Review Karma for every user. Your Review Karma is based entirely on what other Vinquire users thought of your wine reviews; particularly, how helpful your review was to them.

Under each wine review you'll now see a small form to evaluate the helpfulness of the review:



When you come across a review that you thought helped shape your opinion of a wine, click "Helpful". Alternatively, when you come across a review that didn't help you at all or you thought was just poor overall, click "Not Helpful". You would also want to click "Helpful" if you thought an individual reviewer had exceptional wine knowledge and a well trained palate.

Additionally, if you're curious about your Review Karma status go to your My Reviews page and you'll see it at the top. The more "Helpful" votes you've received, the higher your Review Karma. If you're in the negative, don't be discouraged. What may help is to browse other user's reviews for ideas on ways to improve. Additional information on this page will be each of your review's overall helpfulness, which led to your Review Karma score. This may assist you in identifying your better and not so good reviews.

Keep up the good work everyone, and stay tuned for more features to come!

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Yes, you're on Vinquire.com!

Apr 05, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

We updated the site, big time. Just about everything has changed, highlights include:

New Look & Feel

The new site is higher contrast and should prove easier to read. The site navigation has moved to the left-hand sidebar, and various recent site activity can be found at the bottom of every page.

Wine Recommendations

We now offer wine recommendations for every taste and budget. You can even limit the recommendations to wines that are available at a large retailer (currently Trader Joe's, Costco, BevMo, Albertsons, and Safeway) so you don't have to go out of your way to pick up a palatable bottle.

Advanced Search

On the advanced search page you can now specify price ranges, bottle sizes, and vintage information. Additionally (much like the recommendations feature) you can limit wine results to those available at certain large retailers. You can also sort results on "WineRank" which will order wines via Vinquire's hi-tech recommendation system.

Cleaner Search Results

Search a wine and see what you think. We only display the wine name once now (followed by a list of retailer links to buy that wine), which will hopefully result in less confusion about which wine to click on.

RSS Feeds

Any place you see an icon you can subscribe to the RSS feed for that item (Blog Entries, Wine Reviews, and Forum Posts).

Massive Wine Index

If you're looking to buy a wine at the best price available, our new massive index of wines should help you find the right wine, and the right retailer, for the right price.

Enjoy~
Vinquire.com

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Review ANY wine, view ALL reviews

Jan 29, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

We're pleased to announce yet another beta release. Most of the enhancements are "under the hood", relating to our wine search engine and improving the integrity of that data. Our artificial intelligence has improved, which helps us correctly identify the exact names of the wines for sale, as well as the price details and related data.

Wine Data and Search Results

Another big improvement is that you can now review ANY wine. Prior to this release, we restricted wine reviews of wines that were not popular across different wine retailers, specifically, if that wine was only sold by one retailer. For further explanation on why it was this way initially, view this forum post. In enabling users to review any wine, we had to also make sure they we wouldn't lose reviews when a particular wine is not "for sale" anymore. This is now in place so we encourage you to review away!

As you may have noticed before, there were far too many wines in which our servers weren't able to identify the wine type (ie. "red", "white", etc.). This was usually due to a rare varietal or appellation, but you should now see more accurate wine type identifiers. At the same time we've also added support for wine name and varietal "synonyms". For example, if we find a "chard" and a "chardonnay", or a "cab" and a "cabernet", those will now be more consistently grouped together, respectively, as they should be.

User Enhancements

On the homepage, we're now showing more user submitted data for a recent review or forum post, including the user nickname and the first part of their review comments. There is also this type of related data for the "More Recent Reviews/Topics" sections. Furthermore, users are now able to access EVERY user review that has ever been submitted, all in one area. Just click on the "All Reviews" link under the More Recent Reviews, and you'll be able to sort all reviews on date submitted, wine name, or wine score.

We've also added a new section to the sidebar, called "Recent Activity". This section includes the 2 lists that already existed (Recent Searches and Top Searches), and now features a new list called "Most Popular Wines". These are wines that have been reviewed the most by our users.

And last but not least, you're now able to post comments to our blog posts. So if you're up to it, tell us what you think about each post. And keep up the requests for new features and enhancements, as this will help us gear the product to your needs. Thanks, and stay tuned for next time.

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Tweaks, Features, and Fixes!

Jan 15, 2007 |  Vinquire (14) |  News & Updates |  0 comments

Well, Vinquire has been online for about 3 weeks now, and we received some great feedback. Everyone had ideas and so did we ... we wanted to keep drinking red wine and everybody else wanted us to tweak, fix, and add new features to the site.
We're happy to say you won! So we've added a bunch of new stuff and released the code late Sunday night (1/14/07). Here's a list of what's new ....

• These blog/news entries! Aka, our pulpit :)
• Cleaner display of prices (aka, $9,999.00 instead of $9999.0)
• Larger list of recent reviews and recent forum posts on homepage
• Added Pinot Noir as a possible "favorite wine" on account creation (for you s-dogg)
• Google ads!! Just what you all wanted ;)
• Added wine scoring explanation/key (for 50-100 point scale)
• Reviews can now specify non vintage (NV) for the year
• Added "Welcome, Username" to upper corner if you are logged in
• Searches now "stem" words, aka searching Penfolds/Penfold/Penfold's is the same
• Searches use synonyms now, aka Ch/Chateau are same, Cab/Cabernet, Zin/Zinfandel, etc
• Some common misspellings should now be caught for tough words like Sauvignon, Bordeaux, Champagne, etc.

Hopefully these will make the site a bit more useful. Enjoy and Happy New Year!!

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