BiteHunter launches a search engine for dining deals

The site has been live for months now, but co-founder and chief executive Gil Harel said the company has been fine-tuning the features and is now moving the site into “beta test” mode. As with many other online products, the beta version is already pretty usable. BiteHunter is also announcing a $250,000 seed round of funding.

In a new blog post, Harel describes BiteHunter as “the Kayak.com for dining”. Similar to Kayak’s approach to flights, BiteHunter’s goal is to find restaurant deals wherever they’re posted online, whether it’s a restaurant’s Twitter account, Facebook Page, website, or elsewhere.

So if you’re hungry for Chinese food, you can visit the BiteHunter site, bring up a list of Chinese restaurants in your neighborhood, and see which ones are offering discounts or specials. You can also see which restaurants seem to be getting the most “social buzz” as judged by “likes” and check ins on sites like Facebook and Foursquare.

For a diner, this offers a new way to figure out where to eat — not by finding the restaurant with the best reviews (as you would on Yelp) or the one that best matches your personal taste (as you would on Bizzy) but by finding out who has a good deal tonight. Restaurants, meanwhile, can reach people who haven’t heard of them before. After all, that’s one of the main reason to offer these kinds of specials.

The seed round was led by Eyal Chomski, head of the ad agency Grey Global Group Israel.