BakuGuide — Baku's Online City Guide
A four-language guide to Baku's restaurants, cafés and nightlife — over 4,500 venues, editorial collections and filtering by the features people actually search for.
About the project
BakuGuide is an online guide to the city’s venues: restaurants, pubs and bars, cafés, tea houses, pizzerias, fast food, clubs, leisure centres and banquet halls. The database holds more than 4,500 venues across 60 categories, split both by category and by the city’s ten districts.
The site runs in four languages: Azerbaijani, English, Russian and Arabic.
Arabic reads right to left
Adding Arabic is not a translation job — the entire page flows the other way. So the whole layout is built on logical direction properties: instead of “left” and “right” it says “start” and “end”, and the page mirrors itself when the language changes. Every string coming out of the database carries a direction hint, and fields that are only digits — a price, a phone number, an opening time — stay left-to-right even on the Arabic page, because otherwise the numbers read backwards.
There is no Arabic venue copy yet, so any field without a translation falls through to English and then to Azerbaijani. Nothing on the page is left blank.
Filtering by what people actually want
A category is not enough: nobody searches for “a restaurant”, they search for “a café with wi-fi” or “somewhere with a summer terrace”. So every venue is tagged against 25 features — wi-fi, parking, delivery, live music, hookah, summer terrace, business lunch, facilities for children, VIP rooms, banquet bookings and more.
On a category page those features sit above the listing as buttons, each with a count of how many venues match. The visitor sees the size of the result before committing to the filter.
Editorial collections
The best-performing part of the site is not its automated listings but its hand-picked collections: Fish Restaurants, Live Music, This Week’s Highlights, Business Lunch, Takeaway. There are 85 of them.
The numbers bear this out: click-through from search results to a collection page runs several times higher than to an ordinary category page. The reason is simple — people are asking “where should I go?”, and a category listing does not answer that question, it hands the choice back to them.
Keeping the venue data honest
A database built up over years accumulates venues that have since closed. So we built a process that works through the venues in batches, establishing which have closed and which are missing information. Results are written out as files and applied to the database on the next deploy. A closed venue is not deleted — it is marked as closed.
In search
Over the last three months the site appeared in Google roughly 284,000 times. It sits in the top five for its core queries — restoranlar, bakıda restoranlar, fast food.
That work also turned up a serious defect, since fixed: every page of a paginated category — all 42 pages of restaurants, for instance — carried an identical title and description. Google was choosing between 42 indistinguishable candidates for one query and sometimes picked page seven. Titles now carry the page number from page two onwards.
