Could Yelp be made useful?

January 29, 2012 11:42 PM

My experience using Yelp is that it increasingly sucks. Highly reviewed places can range from decent to abysmal and there is no telling. But one can find some reviewers who seem consistently accurate, and while yelp allows you to follow these folks, it would be much easier if you could FILTER with these folks , but Yelp seems not to want that to happen, for obvious commercial reasons. Could someone develop some way to do that on top of the web site? And if Yelp is unusable for quality reviews, besides CH where else do folks recommend? THanks!
posted by dougiedd to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

My take on Yelp is that quite often, the people on there simply have no idea what good food actually is. Recently I went to a highly reviewed Italian restaurant in my town, and not only was it quite disappointing, I could have gotten a better meal at Olive Garden. But, 4-5 stars on Yelp!

My sister primarily uses it to look at pictures of the food itself and draws her own conclusions there.

For me, the only way to get decent recs is through word-of-mouth from friends and family.
posted by so much modern time at 12:18 AM on January 30, 2012

I feel you on this.

I usually read the reviews which takes more time but usually pulls out the nuances. I think the problem with Yelp is that 4 stars is described "Yay! I'm a fan!" instead of something that indicates a more concrete opinion such as "This restaurant is above average in food quality." There is a local Italian place that I love and frequent regularly but the food there is very solidly just average; it's the price that keeps me going back. What do I rate that on Yelp? I'm definitely a fan. Do I rate on food quality, price, or service?
posted by Defenestrator at 1:18 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

Yelp has just come to Australia. I am sure they have paid/encouraged a stack of reviews to get some initial data in there - the writing is too writer-ish for normal people. And perhaps because it hasn't got enough data yet, the results are difficult to compare when choosing where to go.

Here, I find Urban Spoon to be a pretty good gauge. As well as the on-site reviews, there are links to blogs and often these are foodie people blogs. It covers quite a lot of US, UK, Canadian and Australian cities. YMMV.
posted by AnnaRat at 1:20 AM on January 30, 2012

I agree. Though I have sometimes found that restaurants I have really enjoyed have received very poor reviews on Yelp, kind of a reversal of what others have seen.

I use OpenTable, Qype (for UK) and Chowhound's boards to compare, sometimes Eatability in Australia.
posted by wingless_angel at 1:55 AM on January 30, 2012

Urban Spoon works better for me than Yelp; I like that it's an up-or-down vote instead of a star system.
posted by SMPA at 2:35 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

Part of the trick anywhere is knowing how to read the reviews on any site. Going by the numbers alone will result in a mixed experience: was someone bitter about a particular service experience on a holiday night? Is a 5-star review just "so gr8 would eet again!"? So actually reading the reviews and pairing it with perusing the business's own web page is a huge help.

I have been quite happy with - amazingly - tripadvisor for restaurant and hotel reviews. This is in particular for large and medium sized cities in Texas and the southeast US, though I am getting more experience with it in Europe as well. So far it has pointed me towards some really excellent meals (etc), and warned me against some that had seemed promising.

Also, don't forget AskMe. search by tag and city.
posted by whatzit at 2:46 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've started relying on tripadvisor and since every review gets hand screened I've had very good luck. Plus the cocommunity seems to actively mark the accurate reviews as "helpful." Its less known then yelp urbanspon etc wrt food reviews but as I said very accurate.
posted by chasles at 5:36 AM on January 30, 2012 [5 favorites]

Not sure where you are located, but Serious Eats does good descriptive reviews if it covers any restaurants near you.
posted by mlle valentine at 6:19 AM on January 30, 2012

If you join Yelp and add those people as "friends" or whatever, their reviews will show at the top when you check out a new restaurant (if they have reviewed it). Maybe that will help?
posted by lohmannn at 6:59 AM on January 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

In addition to Chowhound and Serious Eats, I find the posters on LTHForum to be discerning and trustworthy.

I don't trust TripAdvisor as I find the ratings are too easily gamed (see Patzeria in the rankings of NYC restaurants, who has an artificially high ranking and lots of positive reviews from people with no user icon/only 1 review posted ever). There are also a good number of chain restaurants in the "top NYC restaurants" list as the ratings.
posted by kathryn at 9:05 AM on January 30, 2012

I've used, variously over the years: Citysearch, Zagat, Chowhound, TripAdvisor, Menupages, and Yelp for user-generated reviews, and in my experience they simply don't replace the opinions of an actual paid restaurant critic. They're a) too easy to game when niche, and 2) when they become popular enough, are overwhelmed by reviews from people who know nothing about food.

Most major city papers or alternative weeklies maintain a searchable database of past reviews. I generally use this as a starting point for finding restaurants, and then check Yelp for correlation. Yelp is great for helping you spot and avoid restaurants that have recently gone downhill (the major problem with professional reviews that may be 2-3 years old).

For more spur-of-the-moment "what's good nearby" decisions, Foodspotting still seems to be niche enough to generate good opinions.
posted by psycheslamp at 10:29 AM on January 30, 2012

I'm nthing the "read the reviews" advice. Restaurants on Yelp are, quite properly, rated not in absolute terms but with an implicit "of its type" proviso. Thus a five-star 1-dollar-sign hamburger stand obviously isn't meant to be the same food-quality as a five-star 4-dollar-sign french restaurant.

I still find Yelp really helpful in choosing restaurants in unfamiliar locations, just so long as I read enough of the reviews to get a sense of what the reviewers were looking for and what the context of their reviews was: if it's a five star review on the theme "a great place to take the kids on a Friday night!!" then I know it's probably not what I'm looking for.
posted by yoink at 10:29 AM on January 30, 2012

I've been on Yelp since it started and I generally look at the reviews my closer Yelp friends write, and go on their assessment.

It is true there are sometimes 'stacked' reviews.. Yelp tries to get those filtered out, and some cities' Yelpers are way better about self-policing those than others.
posted by bitterkitten at 10:51 AM on January 30, 2012

Heh. My theory is that people rarely rate the restaurant itself; instead, they rate how they feel about themselves eating at the restaurant. If eating there makes them feel hip and cool, they'll give it a high rating. If the place has already been "discovered" and the reviewer doesn't have a 100% mindblowingly-awesome experience, they'll give it a 2-star rating and talk about how it's "overrated", or worse, they'll complain about the price. (WTF? That's one thing you can find out before even making a reservation)

One thing I don't get is how often complain about "the service". I mean, really? I eat out *a lot*, and most of the time the service is just kinda there. I mean, occasionally I get exceptional service, and every great once in a while I'll get lousy service, but for the most part, "the service" is just kinda there doing their jobs. I usually don't even remember them well enough to comment on them. How is it that so many people have problems with "the service"?
posted by Afroblanco at 2:46 PM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've been turned on to Foodspotting, which is a bit better than Yelp. It helps you narrow down the best things to eat at a particular restaurant. I also check out Chowhound, Serious Eats, and Eater.
posted by loriginedumonde at 5:45 PM on January 30, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for all the suggestions
I myself forgot about egullet.org, anther fine source
posted by dougiedd at 8:41 AM on January 31, 2012