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I've found Google Maps review quality and quantity improved over the last few years so it's rare that I'd even open Yelp in recent months. With this, I'm delet

I've found Google Maps review quality and quantity improved over the last few years so it's rare that I'd even open Yelp in recent months. With this, I'm deleting my Yelp app.

wil421 7y ago
Lately I’ve noticed Google Maps had better images. Not sure if they scrape some of them but they didn’t overlap with Yelp. Google Maps reviews also tend to be more positive. The two bad things I noticed were fake guides and a few bogus sounding comments.
- bilal4hmed 7y ago
  I've noticed Google Maps tends to have more recent reviews as well compared to yelp and newer restaurant information is updated faster.
- shostack 7y ago
  Really wish they'd make it easy to show images of menus in restaurants. I usually use Yelp for easily viewing photos of different aspects from interior/exterior to menu, etc.
tfha 7y ago
Meh. I remember we used to use Yelp to find the best restaurants in a city. It worked incredibly well. It doesn't anymore, but Google maps is not better. For example, I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy! I tend to blame SEO first and ads / paid promotion second.
- quietbritishjim 7y ago
  If you're looking for good restaurants in a city, TripAdvisor is probably your best bet. It does have the downside of terrible location-based search though (what decent restaurants are within 50m of my current position?).
  - hyperbovine 7y ago
    (TripAdvisor-owned) TheFork, aka La Fourchette, is the way to go in Europe. The quality of the reviews on that site is impressive, and there are numerous torch-the-unicorn style discounts to be had. Europeans take their food seriously :-)
  - rcpt 7y ago
    Also chowhound but it's not always up to date
    - splonk 7y ago
      Chowhound basically got destroyed a few years ago when it got acquired and redesigned into an unusable mess, and now traffic has cratered. Some of the regulars split off into new sites - HungryOnion (mostly SF Bay) and FoodTalkCentral (mostly LA), but neither seems to have the critical mass that Chowhound used to have that made it a useful global resource.
  - splonk 7y ago
    TA is pretty close to last on my list for restaurant search. The top of every ranking in any even mildly touristy city is going to be spammed to hell and back. It's basically a list of "where do tourists go who can be preferentially selected into leaving a review?"
- jonas21 7y ago
  > I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy! That says more about Brooklyn than Google Maps.
  - moate 7y ago
    While ragging on Brooklyn hipsters can be fun, I promise you, there's real wing joints scattered all over the place. Yes, there's also probably a place doing a chicken skin crackling with a capsaicin blue cheese emulsion as well, but you can also just get some wings.
    - tvladeck 7y ago
      Came here to agree with you. Tons of great wings spots here. Also, The Infatuation is great for NYC restaurant reviews.
- perfectstorm 7y ago
  Have you compared Google maps' results to those of Yelp's in Brooklyn? Did they show you anything that Google Maps didn't show? Last time i checked Yelp was not available outside USA (checked while I was in India/Japan ~two years ago) while Google maps tons of data in those locations.
- rhacker 7y ago
  This happens to me too, also if you say the city and the name of the place it will definitely not find locations that are outside the official city border, even if it's 25 feet from that border. So crazy too because I can literally be next to a restaurant, ask for it, and not find it. The other thing that absolutely drives me bonkers - Google maps keeps routing me to the back of something, like literally to the truck entrance of whatever grocery store or restaurant I am routing to. You would think they would employ ML to visually figure out where the parking lot is vs the truck entrance.
ortusdux 7y ago
The 7 years that google owned zagat correlated with a massive improvement in the quality of their reviews. I have done the google maps local guide program a bit and the way it is structured is great. The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews. A few months ago a friend asked me what I was up to, so I sent them a photo of 2 flights of beer in an attempt to get them to meet me at the bar. later, Maps asked if I liked the bar and wanted to upload the photo. For the last 2 months that photo has been the official picture of the bar and received over 250k views. Minimal input or interruption for me, large return for google.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  > The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews. Funny, I hate when google asks me this. It feels like an invasion of my privacy, a reminder that they are tracking everything I do.
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    It only does this if you have location services turned on. You actually told Google it was ok to use your location to provide location specific services. That's not what I would call "tracking", which implies something clandestine.
    - daveFNbuck 7y ago
      Google requires this permission to do anything remotely location-based and uses it extremely liberally. I shouldn't have to agree to have them link my photos to the restaurant I'm in just so I can save a home location for driving directions.
      - waldoh 7y ago
        It doesnt post anything without your permission. And you can long hold the notification to suppress and never see them again. It's not that big of a deal
makerofspoons 7y ago
Their CEO was on NPR recently complaining about how Google Maps was eating their lunch and how it wasn't fair.
- emeraldd 7y ago
  I used to work for a company that owned a bunch of traditional broadcast stations. The day the CEO got up in front of the local branch of the company and asked the question (roughly) "How do we get people to watch broadcast TV again?" I knew it was time to get out there. The company is still around and probably has enough inertia to keep going for a long while, but with that kind of thinking in the leadership, it's pretty much a zombie.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  He's free to find the Google Campus on Google Maps and leave it a 1-star review.
futureastronaut 7y ago
Google Maps is also shoving Grubhub down our throats. Every time I try to call a restaurant's phone numer in the new Maps app, I end up accidentally opening a Grubhub tab in Chrome.
- ajross 7y ago
  I... can't confirm this at all. Opened maps, clicked on a restaurant, selected "call", and brought up the phone app. The only way I can get to a delivery provider is to click a button marked "Delivery". And even there it seems to be suggesting DoorDash to me, even for restaurants that I can find listed on GrubHub's site.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
notyourday 7y ago
Yelp still has the best (as in the most comprehensive) reviews of restaurants. Google's reviews are littered with one sentence reviews which is rather unfortunate. Having said that Yelp is absolutely, positively removes negative reviews from places that pay it for promoting. Having written a few and having opened tickets after those reviews disappeared I found the fun tricks they use to be able to claim that they don't censor reviews. They absolutely do. The only way to ensure that your review stays up is to post a copy of your check as a part of your review ( that's why you are seeing them these days ) which of course makes you totally identifiable and open to the lawsuits. Otherwise whoever "owns" the listing can dispute the review by claiming the person who left it is not sharing his or her personal experience.
DantesKite 7y ago
I wonder sometimes if Google Maps does better than Yelp because it tracks where people actually eat, not where they say they eat.
- auslander 7y ago
  and if they search for digestion medicine after they eat.
libria 7y ago
The Google alternative to Yelp is Local Guides: https://maps.google.com/localguides https://maps.google.com/localguides You can earn points and level up for your contributions (reviews, photos), but they don't have anywhere near the incentive structure as Yelp yet.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I don't like the incentives that things like "starred" users (aka local guides) creates. I feel like it's only a matter of time before they become the G Maps version of "influencers", who get paid to post glowing reviews. I'm much more likely to trust reviews from regular users. They don't have to be well written, just descriptive enough for me to make a decision.
duxup 7y ago
When I used to use Yelp, I found the reviews are so hard to wade though. So many: - I had a bad time .. once. - This restaurant isn't as good as this other place that is twice as expensive. - We had to wait a "long time". - The food sucked (because they don't like the kind of food they serve...). - This place sucks and you should go to this other completely different place.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  There's a local restaurant known for it's macaroni and cheese. That and a few sides dishes are all they serve, and it's all fantastic. One of their bad Yelp reviews was that their beer list of local microbrews wasn't extensive enough.
- dboreham 7y ago
  I see many negative reviews that I suspect are from people acting in the interests of competitive restaurants.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I always thought that some of the bad reviews must be from ex-employees.
- floren 7y ago
  Also "the staff is so RUDE!". Any review which uses the word "rude" can be safely ignored, because it's written by the kind of person who considers it rude that his/her water glass went unfilled for nearly 30 seconds after being emptied.
  - duxup 7y ago
    I always wonder about that, like who is the rude person... really hard to know. I don't think I've ever encountered "rude" staff. Maybe just dumb luck but it's just not something that has occurred to me where I thought that.
    - 7y ago
ac29 7y ago
Google maps has definitely improved, but they are even worse than most review sites in the near worthlessness of their review scores. The vast majority of restaurants are rated between 4 and 5 stars, with the difference between a 4.1 and 4.6 being huge - the former being 50/50 that its good, the latter being the sort of place worth waiting in line for. The closest Michelin starred restaurant to me is rated 0.2 points higher than the forgettable greek restaurant across the parking lot from where I work, and less than 1 point better than taco bell.
- tyre 7y ago
  I will not tolerate taco bell slander on this web forum
- CamelCaseName 7y ago
  Well sure, because a rating doesn't measure how good a restaurant is compared to all other restaurants. Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from. It's also unfair to rate both a $1 coffee and a $8 coffee on the same basis, it's clear that the cost constraints put pressure on how good you can make that coffee. It's not unfair for an $8 coffee to be higher quality, but worse rated than a $1 coffee. I rely and rate on Google Maps excessively, using it to plan trips and to eat out. It has consistently been the best source of information. All you have to do is first filter for the type / class of cuisine you want.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    >Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from. See above, but I find the opposite to be often true. I see reviews for restaurants I am very familiar with, that I know to be excellent and basically the best option for innovative cuisine in a 100 mile radius, which say "Way overpriced small portions". Pretty clear that whoever wrote that review was operating outside their preferred restaurant class.
  - JaRail 7y ago
fma 7y ago
I like Google Reviews too and use it more than Yelp. Especially when Yelp forces me to download the app. But I find it difficult to generate a link directly to Google reviews for a particular place... I can link to the Google maps results, but a review page by itself to read/write reviews would be nice.
proverbialbunny 7y ago
Does google maps have a search by rating, open time, and so on? I usually eat dinner around the time most restaurants have closed in the area. I find when I search google maps it gives me places closed, and often the hours in their listings are off. To be fair, hours have improved quite a bit in the last year. I need a way to filter what I'm looking for.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Try "X open now".
Aeolun 7y ago
But Google Maps is owned by Google. You’re basically exchanging the devil for Hitler. It’s an improvement, but still bad.
aarbor989 7y ago
When I was in physical therapy about a year ago they told me to leave reviews in Google rather than Yelp because research showed it was more effective. I found it hard to believe since my peers and I both used Yelp way more, but I find this recent behavior from Yelp abhorrent so it may be time to switch

I've found Google Maps review quality and quantity improved over the last few years so it's rare that I'd even open Yelp in recent months. With this, I'm deleting my Yelp app.

wil421 7y ago

Lately I’ve noticed Google Maps had better images. Not sure if they scrape some of them but they didn’t overlap with Yelp. Google Maps reviews also tend to be more positive. The two bad things I noticed were fake guides and a few bogus sounding comments.

bilal4hmed 7y ago
I've noticed Google Maps tends to have more recent reviews as well compared to yelp and newer restaurant information is updated faster.
shostack 7y ago
Really wish they'd make it easy to show images of menus in restaurants. I usually use Yelp for easily viewing photos of different aspects from interior/exterior to menu, etc.

tfha 7y ago

Meh. I remember we used to use Yelp to find the best restaurants in a city. It worked incredibly well. It doesn't anymore, but Google maps is not better. For example, I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy! I tend to blame SEO first and ads / paid promotion second.

quietbritishjim 7y ago
If you're looking for good restaurants in a city, TripAdvisor is probably your best bet. It does have the downside of terrible location-based search though (what decent restaurants are within 50m of my current position?).
- hyperbovine 7y ago
  (TripAdvisor-owned) TheFork, aka La Fourchette, is the way to go in Europe. The quality of the reviews on that site is impressive, and there are numerous torch-the-unicorn style discounts to be had. Europeans take their food seriously :-)
- rcpt 7y ago
  Also chowhound but it's not always up to date
  - splonk 7y ago
    Chowhound basically got destroyed a few years ago when it got acquired and redesigned into an unusable mess, and now traffic has cratered. Some of the regulars split off into new sites - HungryOnion (mostly SF Bay) and FoodTalkCentral (mostly LA), but neither seems to have the critical mass that Chowhound used to have that made it a useful global resource.
- splonk 7y ago
  TA is pretty close to last on my list for restaurant search. The top of every ranking in any even mildly touristy city is going to be spammed to hell and back. It's basically a list of "where do tourists go who can be preferentially selected into leaving a review?"
jonas21 7y ago
> I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy! That says more about Brooklyn than Google Maps.
- moate 7y ago
  While ragging on Brooklyn hipsters can be fun, I promise you, there's real wing joints scattered all over the place. Yes, there's also probably a place doing a chicken skin crackling with a capsaicin blue cheese emulsion as well, but you can also just get some wings.
  - tvladeck 7y ago
    Came here to agree with you. Tons of great wings spots here. Also, The Infatuation is great for NYC restaurant reviews.
perfectstorm 7y ago
Have you compared Google maps' results to those of Yelp's in Brooklyn? Did they show you anything that Google Maps didn't show? Last time i checked Yelp was not available outside USA (checked while I was in India/Japan ~two years ago) while Google maps tons of data in those locations.
rhacker 7y ago
This happens to me too, also if you say the city and the name of the place it will definitely not find locations that are outside the official city border, even if it's 25 feet from that border. So crazy too because I can literally be next to a restaurant, ask for it, and not find it. The other thing that absolutely drives me bonkers - Google maps keeps routing me to the back of something, like literally to the truck entrance of whatever grocery store or restaurant I am routing to. You would think they would employ ML to visually figure out where the parking lot is vs the truck entrance.

ortusdux 7y ago

The 7 years that google owned zagat correlated with a massive improvement in the quality of their reviews. I have done the google maps local guide program a bit and the way it is structured is great. The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews. A few months ago a friend asked me what I was up to, so I sent them a photo of 2 flights of beer in an attempt to get them to meet me at the bar. later, Maps asked if I liked the bar and wanted to upload the photo. For the last 2 months that photo has been the official picture of the bar and received over 250k views. Minimal input or interruption for me, large return for google.

ativzzz 7y ago
> The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews. Funny, I hate when google asks me this. It feels like an invasion of my privacy, a reminder that they are tracking everything I do.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  It only does this if you have location services turned on. You actually told Google it was ok to use your location to provide location specific services. That's not what I would call "tracking", which implies something clandestine.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    Google requires this permission to do anything remotely location-based and uses it extremely liberally. I shouldn't have to agree to have them link my photos to the restaurant I'm in just so I can save a home location for driving directions.
    - waldoh 7y ago
      It doesnt post anything without your permission. And you can long hold the notification to suppress and never see them again. It's not that big of a deal

makerofspoons 7y ago

Their CEO was on NPR recently complaining about how Google Maps was eating their lunch and how it wasn't fair.

emeraldd 7y ago
I used to work for a company that owned a bunch of traditional broadcast stations. The day the CEO got up in front of the local branch of the company and asked the question (roughly) "How do we get people to watch broadcast TV again?" I knew it was time to get out there. The company is still around and probably has enough inertia to keep going for a long while, but with that kind of thinking in the leadership, it's pretty much a zombie.
antisthenes 7y ago
He's free to find the Google Campus on Google Maps and leave it a 1-star review.

futureastronaut 7y ago

Google Maps is also shoving Grubhub down our throats. Every time I try to call a restaurant's phone numer in the new Maps app, I end up accidentally opening a Grubhub tab in Chrome.

ajross 7y ago
I... can't confirm this at all. Opened maps, clicked on a restaurant, selected "call", and brought up the phone app. The only way I can get to a delivery provider is to click a button marked "Delivery". And even there it seems to be suggesting DoorDash to me, even for restaurants that I can find listed on GrubHub's site.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

notyourday 7y ago

Yelp still has the best (as in the most comprehensive) reviews of restaurants. Google's reviews are littered with one sentence reviews which is rather unfortunate. Having said that Yelp is absolutely, positively removes negative reviews from places that pay it for promoting. Having written a few and having opened tickets after those reviews disappeared I found the fun tricks they use to be able to claim that they don't censor reviews. They absolutely do. The only way to ensure that your review stays up is to post a copy of your check as a part of your review ( that's why you are seeing them these days ) which of course makes you totally identifiable and open to the lawsuits. Otherwise whoever "owns" the listing can dispute the review by claiming the person who left it is not sharing his or her personal experience.

DantesKite 7y ago

I wonder sometimes if Google Maps does better than Yelp because it tracks where people actually eat, not where they say they eat.

auslander 7y ago
and if they search for digestion medicine after they eat.

libria 7y ago

The Google alternative to Yelp is Local Guides: https://maps.google.com/localguides https://maps.google.com/localguides You can earn points and level up for your contributions (reviews, photos), but they don't have anywhere near the incentive structure as Yelp yet.

rchaud 7y ago
I don't like the incentives that things like "starred" users (aka local guides) creates. I feel like it's only a matter of time before they become the G Maps version of "influencers", who get paid to post glowing reviews. I'm much more likely to trust reviews from regular users. They don't have to be well written, just descriptive enough for me to make a decision.

duxup 7y ago

When I used to use Yelp, I found the reviews are so hard to wade though. So many: - I had a bad time .. once. - This restaurant isn't as good as this other place that is twice as expensive. - We had to wait a "long time". - The food sucked (because they don't like the kind of food they serve...). - This place sucks and you should go to this other completely different place.

kstrauser 7y ago
There's a local restaurant known for it's macaroni and cheese. That and a few sides dishes are all they serve, and it's all fantastic. One of their bad Yelp reviews was that their beer list of local microbrews wasn't extensive enough.
dboreham 7y ago
I see many negative reviews that I suspect are from people acting in the interests of competitive restaurants.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I always thought that some of the bad reviews must be from ex-employees.
floren 7y ago
Also "the staff is so RUDE!". Any review which uses the word "rude" can be safely ignored, because it's written by the kind of person who considers it rude that his/her water glass went unfilled for nearly 30 seconds after being emptied.
- duxup 7y ago
  I always wonder about that, like who is the rude person... really hard to know. I don't think I've ever encountered "rude" staff. Maybe just dumb luck but it's just not something that has occurred to me where I thought that.
  - 7y ago

ac29 7y ago

Google maps has definitely improved, but they are even worse than most review sites in the near worthlessness of their review scores. The vast majority of restaurants are rated between 4 and 5 stars, with the difference between a 4.1 and 4.6 being huge - the former being 50/50 that its good, the latter being the sort of place worth waiting in line for. The closest Michelin starred restaurant to me is rated 0.2 points higher than the forgettable greek restaurant across the parking lot from where I work, and less than 1 point better than taco bell.

tyre 7y ago
I will not tolerate taco bell slander on this web forum
CamelCaseName 7y ago
Well sure, because a rating doesn't measure how good a restaurant is compared to all other restaurants. Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from. It's also unfair to rate both a $1 coffee and a $8 coffee on the same basis, it's clear that the cost constraints put pressure on how good you can make that coffee. It's not unfair for an $8 coffee to be higher quality, but worse rated than a $1 coffee. I rely and rate on Google Maps excessively, using it to plan trips and to eat out. It has consistently been the best source of information. All you have to do is first filter for the type / class of cuisine you want.
- dboreham 7y ago
  >Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from. See above, but I find the opposite to be often true. I see reviews for restaurants I am very familiar with, that I know to be excellent and basically the best option for innovative cuisine in a 100 mile radius, which say "Way overpriced small portions". Pretty clear that whoever wrote that review was operating outside their preferred restaurant class.
- JaRail 7y ago

fma 7y ago

I like Google Reviews too and use it more than Yelp. Especially when Yelp forces me to download the app. But I find it difficult to generate a link directly to Google reviews for a particular place... I can link to the Google maps results, but a review page by itself to read/write reviews would be nice.

proverbialbunny 7y ago

Does google maps have a search by rating, open time, and so on? I usually eat dinner around the time most restaurants have closed in the area. I find when I search google maps it gives me places closed, and often the hours in their listings are off. To be fair, hours have improved quite a bit in the last year. I need a way to filter what I'm looking for.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Try "X open now".

Aeolun 7y ago

But Google Maps is owned by Google. You’re basically exchanging the devil for Hitler. It’s an improvement, but still bad.

aarbor989 7y ago

When I was in physical therapy about a year ago they told me to leave reviews in Google rather than Yelp because research showed it was more effective. I found it hard to believe since my peers and I both used Yelp way more, but I find this recent behavior from Yelp abhorrent so it may be time to switch