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This is completely Anecdotal, but, as a foodie, I find the Google reviews have a higher aggregate "crowd wisdom" than Yelp. I am constantly shocked by the lack

This is completely Anecdotal, but, as a foodie, I find the Google reviews have a higher aggregate "crowd wisdom" than Yelp. I am constantly shocked by the lack of correlation between rating and quality in the restaurants I look up on yelp. Before it died, UrbanSpoon was better than Yelp too. TripAdvisor is the worst because it's 99% tourists, so you never get a local's opinion of what's good in their area. Just my 2 cents.

ghaff 8y ago
I don't know if any of this is carryover from Zagat but I tend to agree. Zagat was quirky in its own way with the brief summations of crowdsourced (before that was a term) comments on restaurants--but, because it was definitely oriented toward foodies, I found it very reliable. I do find Yelp better than throwing darts at a dartboard. But especially if reviews are thin or the restaurant caters to the sports bar crowd or whatever, it's not much better. I honestly don't think any of the crowdsourced sites are great. But it's hard to get much from other sources outside of some major cities, especially if you're just looking for something simple.
- notyourday 8y ago
  Zagat had enormous grade inflation. There were even studies done on it - unfortunately the name of the paper currently escapes me and googling only provides explanation of why it is happening rather than the data source. Yelp's biggest issue is Yelp Elite crowd. It wields sufficient power in local markets that people want to belong to it and in order to belong one does not just need to review lots of places, one needs to review them quite well i.e. lots of positive spin ( look at distribution of 4-5 stars vs. 1-2 stars in ratings given to restaurants by Yelp Elite ). So either all the places are amazing or as the group Elites have a collective hive mind.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >Zagat had enormous grade inflation. Yes, but so does pretty much every rating system of this type. Most 3-star items on Amazon aren't very good. [1] Back when they used a 30 point system, I found that anything above 21 or so on Zagat was almost always pretty decent. Yelp seems to be around 4-star+ with less consistency. [1] https://xkcd.com/1098/ https://xkcd.com/1098/
polyomino 8y ago
Google reviews have orders of magnitute higher counts compared to yelp throughout Europe and likely elsewhere outside the US.

ghaff 8y ago

I don't know if any of this is carryover from Zagat but I tend to agree. Zagat was quirky in its own way with the brief summations of crowdsourced (before that was a term) comments on restaurants--but, because it was definitely oriented toward foodies, I found it very reliable. I do find Yelp better than throwing darts at a dartboard. But especially if reviews are thin or the restaurant caters to the sports bar crowd or whatever, it's not much better. I honestly don't think any of the crowdsourced sites are great. But it's hard to get much from other sources outside of some major cities, especially if you're just looking for something simple.

notyourday 8y ago
Zagat had enormous grade inflation. There were even studies done on it - unfortunately the name of the paper currently escapes me and googling only provides explanation of why it is happening rather than the data source. Yelp's biggest issue is Yelp Elite crowd. It wields sufficient power in local markets that people want to belong to it and in order to belong one does not just need to review lots of places, one needs to review them quite well i.e. lots of positive spin ( look at distribution of 4-5 stars vs. 1-2 stars in ratings given to restaurants by Yelp Elite ). So either all the places are amazing or as the group Elites have a collective hive mind.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >Zagat had enormous grade inflation. Yes, but so does pretty much every rating system of this type. Most 3-star items on Amazon aren't very good. [1] Back when they used a 30 point system, I found that anything above 21 or so on Zagat was almost always pretty decent. Yelp seems to be around 4-star+ with less consistency. [1] https://xkcd.com/1098/ https://xkcd.com/1098/

polyomino 8y ago

Google reviews have orders of magnitute higher counts compared to yelp throughout Europe and likely elsewhere outside the US.