In most areas, this will simply show which restaurants are actively maintaining their Google Maps entry by having all negative reviews removed, which ones are putting some effort into fake reviews and which ones just don't care.<p>I would say the best places typically score low fours and have at least some one-star reviews written by seemingly deranged people.<p>One might think that caring about not having bad reviews corelates with caring about the quality of ones services, but I haven' t found this to be the case.
Most of the time, if I want to rely on reviews for a restaurant or hotel choice, I go straight to the 1 to 3 star reviews.<p>If those are complains like "waiter was not nice", "they took 30 minutes to bring my food", I'll assume there's nothing to worry about.<p>My feeling is that bad reviews are more likely to be more trustworthy, because they are less likely to be faked (unless its the competition).
I don't trust Google reviews anymore, Maps or otherwise.<p>Look at how many reviews will just be five-star ones, but no text. Or, one or two words quips, like, "great food!"<p>Negative reviews might also be emotionally driven, some by one-time events, like a to-go order taking too long because of a large office order that preceded it.<p>When I was apartment shopping, I saw so many "sketchy" reviews on Google and reporting them does nothing. Many would be from people who only toured the place and NEVER actually lived there, or from people who just moved in. Both are useless, but does Google care? No! Hence, my disdain for Google reviews.
Founder of Salamanca here, an app that aggregates every major restaurant booking platform into one app (OpenTable, SevenRooms, Tock, Resy, The Fork and others..)<p>Firstly, nice site - always love new tools to discover restaurants, thanks for posting, I’ve shared your blog post with friends, it was a brilliant read.<p>I have some recent experience working with restaurant reviews, I found that using only Google reviews can be unreliable, as some places that have top reviews may not be generally accepted as the ‘best’ restaurants.<p>We currently use a combination of Google reviews + Trip Advisor + Reviews from the booking platforms and we have web crawlers to check if the restaurant is featured on reputable restaurant guides or review sites.<p>We aggregate all of this review data and compute a “score”, so when users search for available tables in a city we can show available tables at the highest scoring restaurants first.<p>We apply Wilson score confidence intervals, to trust restaurant scores that have more reviews.<p>We are also applying an exponential decay when users list nearby restaurants, as you might be willing to travel a little further to go to a higher scoring restaurant.<p>Working with review data is fascinating.. we’re going to be launching an AI summary of recent reviews and our computed score in the coming weeks to help our users understand our ratings.<p>Our app went live on the App Store only a few days ago and we expect it to be live on Google play later this week.. so it’s an extremely busy time!<p>If you’re interested in what we’re doing please reach out, it would be great to connect, I really enjoyed your article!
It's funny seeing a Cuban place as #1, because it was the same in my old city.<p>The Cuban places were upscale, fancy, had amazing food and drinks. They became the de facto 'take a visitor out' spot. No qualms there with the ranking, few places even seemed to compete.<p>The disconnect(ie funny?) is that Americans think of Cuba as a failed, second/third world country as we're taught. So that would seemingly lead to the people/restaurants owners being cheap and scrappy. But here they are, showing everyone else up in multiple cities. I respect that a lot.
Hi Matt! I did something similar for <a href="https://sweetspots.fr/" rel="nofollow">https://sweetspots.fr/</a> it would get updated every week and was very helpful for discovering cities.<p>I stopped maintaining the project 1 year ago so the list are getting stale now but it was fun while it lasted. Glad to see someone else look into this!
All I want from Google Maps is the ability to sort by number of reviews. You can <i>almost</i> get it. If you click a "Busy Area", it will show you a list of businesses in that small area sorted by number of reviews and it's incredibly useful. But if there isn't a "Busy Area" to click on you can't get it, and you can't sort search results that way either.<p>The crappiness of the ranking and filtering options in Maps search is completely inexcusable. Ranking is Google's core business!
I would rather go to a restaurant with a 4.9 rating based on 1000 reviews than to a restaurant with one with a 5 rating based on 1 review. Makes me wonder: how would that feeling translate into a ranking function though.
Wanderlog seems to be scraping Google Maps and TripAdvisor for all their restaurant data, then rerank them.<p><a href="https://wanderlog.com/list/geoCategory/1/where-to-eat-best-restaurants-in-tokyo" rel="nofollow">https://wanderlog.com/list/geoCategory/1/where-to-eat-best-r...</a>
Blog post/how he did it was discussed a few day ago (37 points, 18 comments)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026668">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026668</a>
I want to do this where I live! I think it might be easier for me because my county has an open data portal with a list of the restaurants (because of inspections) and their locations.<p>Looks like Boulder County has one too <a href="https://opendata-bouldercounty.hub.arcgis.com/documents/c9d2014e937245a494df381ec0343716/explore" rel="nofollow">https://opendata-bouldercounty.hub.arcgis.com/documents/c9d2...</a>
I find reviews in tourist places in Europe are heavily gamed by flirty waiters and begging for 5* reviews, often with freebies like a free shot etc.<p>I was in Spain for a couple of weeks and every 4.5 or higher rated place on Google maps was a disappointment and had handsome nice waiters<p>It's amazing how many people are happy with expensive poor food with nice service (I do understand service is part of eating out of course)
> I saw some shady third-party tool that scrapes the data, but it's against the Terms of Service and I don't want to worry about being banned from my entire Google ecosystem.<p>I'm pretty sure Google Terms prohibits using data from its Maps API otherwise than in connection with displaying/using a Google Maps service, but maybe they won't go after this, because it's not much data.
Seems the second part (well actually showing the same dataset) of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026668">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026668</a>
Congrats for getting twice on the front page with the same material
Why not just try them all?<p><a href="https://probability.ca/diners/rules.html" rel="nofollow">https://probability.ca/diners/rules.html</a>