There's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking over ideas of where to eat with friends. It doesn't mean that I'm living my life wrong.

But let's just say for sake of argument that it's best to always be random and spontaneous. Tonight, you should randomly pick a channel on TV, and watch it. Or randomly select a movie. Maybe you don't watch TV or movies. Then a random book off the library shelf?

I do in general terms like your suggestion about being spontaneous, and living in the moment, and embracing chaos and randomness. And here's a suggestion for you: don't tell other people how to live; it's unseemly.

It's a nice suggestion, to live in the moment and be spontaneous, but it's highly impractical. Sometimes it makes sense to work with more information when it's available. Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse? Sometimes it makes sense to be discerning with limited resources. I'm as zen as the next guy, and live in the moment. I just got to this town, and I'd like to start my search with what people think are the most awesome places to eat. Is that so wrong?

It's surely not as wrong as you guys thinking I'm conducting my life improperly for wanting information about where cool places to eat are.

You seem to be overreacting. Suggesting is very different from telling.

Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse?

I think you are conferring a level of undue gravitas to food. Can you really equate selecting where to have lunch with whom to wed?

You can spot a place with a local cliental by the way they interact. If all the tables look like circled wagons fending off marauders, they are tourists. If everyone is well dressed, it's a trendy place with good marketing - people go their once to impress their friends, but don't come back. Expect pretentious overpriced food, if that's what you are looking for.

If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business. While you can't guarantee you'll like it, some people do.

If you're visiting a new place (presumably the typical use case for Yelp), how can you possibly look inside a restaurant and know if the people inside are repeat customers?

>If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business

Oh. So when travelling, you recommend selecting restaurants by looking inside each establishment and inspecting the clothing of the customers? By that argument, how could any restaurant beat (eg) McDonald's, with its casually-dressed, repeat customers?

You can tell by the look of the place that it's not a high end restaurant or a locally run restaurant. That should let you set your expectation for the place.

HN works best when downvoting is not used as disagreement. If you don't like McDonalds, fine. But it's clearly true that many people do.

Now the fries and Coke aren't doing much for you.

This, I think, is the future of crowdsourced review sites. Not necessarily "friends", but at least people with some form of shared experience and mutual interest - and a track record of being honest about what's good and what isn't.

I want the ability to look at a reviewers history, and increase the weighting of reviewers who's reviews I agree with, and to mark as irrelevant the ratings of people who (in my opinion) clearly have no clue about what they're reviewing (or who are obvious shills).

I suspect this could be built on top of Yelp - automatically collate lists of reviewers who's reviews of places we have in common align, and allow me to browse other places they've rated highly (or rated low). I'm guessing doing that as a non-yelp service would be against their TOS, and I'm guessing their business model of "Sorry, we can't 'help' you with negative reviews… Unless of course you choose to become an advertiser?" type extortion would be far less effective if there was a good way to show those poor reviews up as the rantings of the delusional disgruntled that they so often are…

(Of course, if someone were to give me exactly what I'm asking for, I suspect I'd end up with a sanitised subset of "stuff I already know I like" with very little opportunity to discover interesting new things…)

If you see someone whose reviews you like, you can follow them. This will cause their reviews to be at the top of any other businesses you look at. Also, you can click on the name of a person whose review you trust to see a list of other places they reviewed.

I think the only things they are missing from what you suggested (just from what I saw in the FAQ) is personalizing the average rating and aggregating information about the people you trust for you.

If you want to try to implement something like this (perhaps as a browser extension), their APIs look pretty thorough. (http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/business)

Also, the OP said he just moved, so that's probably why he can't just ask friends. Also, even once firmly established in a given region, not everyone has friends in their specific neighborhood, or a given neighborhood they might find themselves in with a rumbling tummy.

Maybe someone can steal that idea and apply it to restaurants.

If there's somebody on your review site, who ranks highly several of my highly ranked coffee shops, and ranks low a subset of my lowly ranked coffee shops, I'd be much more prepared to consider their other coffee shop reviews as relevant to me. Even better, location based services like 4Square of Facebook checkins could expose their "revealed preferences" to the algorithm as well, someone who rates Fourbarrel and Ritual highly, but checks in to Starbucks four times a day is less likely to be someone who's reviews I'd want to read than someone who perhaps rates Fourbarrel and Ritual lower on an absolute scale, but checks into both regularly as well as, say Sightglass and BlueBottle.

I'd really like a time and event aware as well as just venue aware review function. Zeitgeist on a Thursday night, or after a critical mass ride - is a _vastly_ different experience than Zeitgeist on a sunny Saturday afternoon when it's full of slumming sunset and marina crowds. DNA Lounge really needs separate review categories for Death Guild nights, Bootie nights, and out-of-town dubstep artist nights - people who love (and hence rate highly) one of those events are significantly less likely to enjoy the other two as much - which makes a Yelp-style single rating for DNA Lounge not particularly useful.

Another problem is that if your taste is not really mainstream, you have to rate quite a few movies to get accurate predictions. After I reached a couple of hundred movies, the predictions were nearly always completely accurate.

Tripadvisor et al have the advantage that, with all the Internet posting (admittedly with dubious quality, but...), they can show a review of almost anything.

Within my social circle? They won't even be 10% comprehensive for my own town, let alone once I start going away.

Nice idea, won't work.

What counts as a personal link, anyway? There are people on my Facebook profile I knew years ago in a different town, people on my LinkedIn profile I worked with 6-7 years ago. All people with whom I'm happy to stay in contact at a low level and retain in my wider professional network, but would I want to trust a recommendation from a similarly distant contact of theirs as much as I would a day-to-day colleague of my brother-in-law who I see every week? Probably not.

Like I said - nice idea, won't work.

No it's not. I don't understand why so many people are reacting with philosophical criticism to a comment about specific problems with Yelp, in a discussion about that very issue.

Wandering around and finding new places and experiences can be great, but it's not for everyone, and it's certainly not for everyone all the time. There are people who really don't like being "surprised", pleasantly or otherwise. It's not a failing on their part, it's just how they're wired. Services like Yelp are (ostensibly) great for these types of folks, since it allows them to try new things with a little bit of reassurance that if the new thing sucks, it shouldn't suck too bad.

For, say, your tenth wedding anniversary, would you really just show up at the train station with your spouse and your low expectations, hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your randomly-chosen destination?

You are absolutely right, though, my advice is not for everyone, nor all situations. I actually think I am wired a bit wrong, for instance I spent three days in and out of a hospital in Wulumuqi, and I have fond memories of the event, even though at the time it must have been miserable. All I can remember are the cute nurses, the funny glass IV bottles, the $35 CAT scan, and how surprisingly good the hospital was in the farthest place in the world from an ocean.

Part of the problem with something like yelp is that there's no way to gatekeep the genuine and false reviews. Netflix or Amazon, for example, know what you actually paid for. Yelp's got no way to know if you really dined at the restaurant or whether you just know the owner.

Don't they have "Yelp offers"? When you redeem one of these, it's probably because you ate at the restaurant. With the right software, they could even figure out what food you ate, who your server was, and if you tipped well.

Regrets is a bit of a strong word, no? If I walk past a nifty looking sandwich shop and pop in for a meal, and it turns out to be sub-par, is that really a regret?

I'm with jcampbell - if you are inclined to experience significant regret/remorse over having a meal that wasn't too great, it may be time to re-evaluate.

It's not as though I'm saying people are having long dark nights of the soul over a poorly-made salad. But they still feel regret because it's easy to imagine what they might have had.

People will do a lot to avoid even minor regrets. Do you have a favourite restaurant? Do you have a favourite dish at that favourite restaurant? Do you ever feel even slightly reluctant to try a complete new dish at a completely new restaurant? Why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_heuristic

Exploring new restaurants is fun, but also potentially risky and typically needs to be moderated with some degree of caution and preparation.

I recall seeing 5-stars for a sushi restaurant on Yelp, and after an incredibly disappointing meal, I went back to the site and read the reviews. They were all along the lines of "Sushi for under $4! Awesome!." I don't care if it's 4$. If it's bad sushi, it doesn't matter if it's free. I'd rather eat something else. Or maybe the food is great but the service sucks. By conflating all of these categories into a single rating, you end up with ratings that aren't very useful to a lot of people.

No doubt, personalized ratings are the way to go in the future - but none of the apps I've seen (Ness included) seem to do a very good job of this yet.

A Facebook review site where I got reviews just from my friends (or domain experts, ideally also selected by my friends). Right now, Quora and Foursquare seem to be the way to use "friend networks" to find stuff, and then domain-specific sites like chow (for foodies), wis (for watches), etc. too.

I agree with another poster who recommended Chowhound--again if you're willing to spend some time reading rather than just looking for a quick 2 or 3 restaurants to choose from.

PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :(

I don't use Yelp but I do use Goodreads which is a site that allows people to review books. And I find that the book ratings are somewhat reliable. Maybe it's that people who read books and are willing to rate a book are more thoughtful about the process.

Service and location is one component of the eating experience just as food is. Service and location are ways for similar restaurants to compete against each other.

To call people "service and location whores" speaks to your own condescending attitude that you, ironically, accuse others of.

With that said, in my experience, most places with a decent number of ratings tends to be spot on. The thing is that people need to measure their expectations. If a place is highly rated for cheap sushi or cheap taqueria food, then, obviously, ratings are going to be based primarily on price and less so on decor/food. After all, that is the _value_ that cheap eateries provide.

Yelp features a price indicator ($, $$ or $$$). If one was looking for good, expensive sushi, they could easily search for sushi with $$$. If they found a result where the restaurant had one $, then their expectations should adjust accordingly.

You could have cheap sushi that's very good; similarly, you could have excellent sushi that's quite expensive compared to other types of food, but is still cheap for that level of quality. And a third place could have the same price as the second, but much lower quality. Which should get $ vs $$$?

Furthermore, not all cheap restaurants are cheap because they are competing on price. Sometimes they are even run at a loss to sell something else. For example, El Bulli, when it was still in operation, was an expensive restaurant on an absolute basis; but relative to the quality of the food, it was very cheap - because it was not even profitable, the restaurant was run at a loss. Instead, it built a brand around Ferran Adrià that sold books and other things.

Similarly, a local restaurant to me is called Corner Room in Bethnal Green, London. It's cheap food selected from a set menu - and rather than controlling demand with prices, it does it with timing and willingness to wait, since bookings are not taken. The same chef runs a much more expensive restaurant, Viajante.

The value of ratings is only as good as the preference function of the raters. If the raters are drawn randomly, then sure, you can probably rely on the rough consensus. But raters are seldom drawn randomly; for one thing, people are much likely to rate bad experiences than good; people with iPhones and who are generally more plugged in are more likely to rate, and there are demographic and geographic patterns to the popularity of various different rating systems.

Using Yelp in an area where all the locals use a different system, you'll end up with ratings from tourists, who may be bowled over by the novelty of sub-par local food. If your own preference function has a primarily foodie basis, but the website you take reviews from has a more balanced function of location, service and price, then it stands to reason that many places will get much higher ratings than you would rate it yourself, because you assign lower weights to those other factors.

If, as you state, you find ratings are a good match to your own preferences, all that means is that you have a preference function somewhere in the middle of the rating sample. But not everyone is like that.

We once again land up with the situation where Chipotle routinely outranks Michelin rated restaurants.

A better method might be bilateral context-aware ratings, e.g. for a nice dinner would you rather go to X or Y? Troublesome for a start-up due to the amplified network effect, but tenable for a site with an established user base.

On the flip side, ratings are not absolute -- when I'm reading reviews of a take-out burrito joint, I'm not looking for an 8 course meal, and it's possible that the local chipotle really is 5 stars among available burrito joints. My expectations of Per Se are really high, so maybe if I go there and get a meal that's 'only' awesome, it gets 4 stars, without that being inconsistent.

Perhaps better filtering could be done by taking price more into account, or asking users to 'class' a restaurant? (Take out, family, sit-down, gourmet, etc)

Never really got Yelp. Taste in food is too subjective to bother with aggregate data.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ness-dining-guide/id454869181...

I work for Foursquare, so I'm obviously biased, but I think Foursquare Explore is a great way to find good places to eat.

https://foursquare.com/explore

Our recommendations are based on 30 million tips (short recommendations, <= 200 characters) left by our users all over the world. They also take into account the popularity of the venue, the likelihood of people leaving tips there, the time of day, the day of week, and many other factors.

If you have a check-in history with foursquare, or if you have friends that use foursquare, we'll make personalized recommendations. We'll recommend things we think you'll like based on your check-in history and your friend's check-in histories, and we'll highlight which of your friends have been to the places we're recommending, and how often.

The product isn't perfect yet, and there are definitely some big deficiencies if you try to use it as a Yelp replacement (notably, foursquare lacks: hours, webpage links, whether they deliver or not, etc). But it's constantly improving, and it's already pretty good.

</shameless plug>

There are a couple of reasons we might have recommended that Chilli's. Have any of your foursquare friends checked in there? That's a pretty strong signal for us, so that might be why it's showing up so highly. If not, it might be that a lot of people check in to that Chilli's.

That said, there's probably more we can do to detect chain restaurants and either boost them or bury them based on your personal likelihood of visiting chain restaurants. Unfortunately, all our ranking code currently works at the level of individual venues, so there's work for us yet on knowing that the venue is part of a chain and ranking accordingly.

I suspect your local Starbucks has two orders of magnitude more checkins that the local specialty coffee roaster/espresso bar…

Just for kicks I tried San Francisco since Yelp did such a terrible job with recommendations when I was there last time. Sure enough I got a host recommendations that I would consider trying next time I'm out there.

I think for this to be better you could tweak the relevancy based on different psychographic profiles. For example maybe show different results for a foodie, family, and maybe a "safe mode" for out-of-towners which would display a mix of results from the prior two.

I don't really use recommendation sites/apps, because I've never found any of them to be useful (I find Yelp to be worthless), but I'd actually use this.

I totally didn't even know that was a thing in Foursquare. I use Foursquare almost exclusively to catalog where I go out to places, so I can remember later when the last time I was there was.

Even if none of your friends have ever written a tip, I've found that seeing that one of my friends has been to restaurant 3 or 4 times is great way to find good places to eat or drink.

Chipotle is becoming much of the same in reviewership. I personally feel there's too much variation in quality from one Chipotle to the next. 

I do agree, Sol Food is not worth the review points it gets. It's confusing for a first time visitor — communal eating isn't something I'm always in the mood for — prices are too high for the quality in my opinion. 

I belive Sol Food gets the bulk of young teens to early twenty somethings that haven't yet really experienced a wide variety of eating establishments. Coming from fast food or the "Ramen Lifestyle" would indeed make one give a place like Sol Food a great review along with that cult following. 

The trouble with Yelp for me is the tally of "x" stars review. That doesn't easily tell you about the place that has excellent food but is a 60 year old dump. Yelp needs to do something to change the way they average the star ratings with price, quality, service, atmosphere, etc.  Do all this on one page, in as little space as possible, and they may hold out for the long haul without being relegated to something like eBay. eBay, Yelp, Pay-Pal... All the lesser of no other evils... Why change?

I personally care most about food quality/taste with service second in importance. The rest doesn't matter to me often, aside from special occasions like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. A preference that allowed simple weighting of their more granular star rating system could be a good start. 

Even with everything fixed, there's been far too many reports of "shady" practices with ratings dependent on whether or not you advertise with Yelp or not for me to personally trust them. 

Someone will come along with bark, chirp, squeal, or hiss soon enough.

Google tried "hotpot," now "places" with personalized recommendations and no pay-to-play scandals but hardly anyone uses it. My recommendations are OK but not great and I suspect the problem is that they don't have enough data to predict well for me.

I hear (from this discussion) that ness does well with personalized recommendations. I have not heard of it before.

Why does everyone use Yelp rather than Google Places or Ness?

And I'll throw in my two cents. I've never used Yelp to find a restaurant. Usually I depend on asking locals in person or I read daily/weekly papers to see what places they write about.

I agree that plenty of Mexican food is not hard to make (specially the kinds of Mexican food I've seen people eat here in the US) if you can get the ingredients, but (1) you can't always get them, and (2) there is also lots of stuff that is complicated or at least very labor intensive to make at home, like mole. (Which I make a point of eating when I go back to visit.)

Although I have to say, I don't really get the whole "missing food" thing: if what you used to like eating isn't readily available in a new place just give up on it and figure out what's good where you are. I'd be pretty surprised by a place that has no good food at all.

Could also explain the lower food quality too since they may either have overworked staff who will make more mistakes or they have had to hire new staff quickly who they did not have time to select or train properly.

I think this is the opposite reason why there are no high-profile craft beer review sites (yes, small sites exist but they're not going public anytime soon). Beer is a luxury, and there's not much in the way of truly disappointing beer to the point where I've ruined 1/3 of my taste experience for the day by consuming it. If you're going to a brewery to try a beer and don't like it, you can get up and walk out a few bucks lighter and travel to another taphouse. You can't easily do that with a meal.

Of course you have to hope they have taste.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/lami-loui...

That's the other problem with this whole thing, I guess. Yelp's content is basicallu 100% subjective.

I'll also note that it's generally a better idea to phone in your order, unless you're eating at a non-peak hour. Alternatively, they have a second storefront on the north side of that block, on 4th St., that generally has fewer people.

Sometimes both me and my wife would just go out and be adventurous a little bit to try new places or new ethnic foods (but of course we normally avoid high-end places for a try-out).

It's a lifestyle thing (that I blog about once in a while) I suppose.

It's not useful if you don't have friends that use it. It's kinda like last.fm: not actually worth using until you're already using it. Some things you have to see to believe in; others you have to believe in to see. Foursquare is the latter, not the former.

For bars and the like, I've had a good experience with Zagat's specialty guides -- e.g., http://www.zagat.com/product/specialty-guides/san-francisco-...

It's likely you'll find a lot of like-minded ppl on foursquare, too.

Okay, so here's the basic idea: you start to vote, "I liked this, I didn't like that, I liked this." This program Credence would say, "Oh, your preferences are a lot like Alice (someone you don't know), whose preferences are also like Bob (someone who hasn't even rated anything similar to you), and you three are pretty much the exact opposite of Carol (someone else you don't know). Carol thumbs-downed X while Alice and Bob thumbs-upped it, so I'm going to suggest that it's a thumbs-up for you as well."

Notice the key elements of transitivity and negative correlation. Someone who disagrees with you all the time saying "this is bad" could actually make something good.

The idea was to kill linkspam by saying, "if spammers want to thumbs-up their own content, feel free -- but they'd better thumbs-up good content and thumbs-down other spam, at least moreso than they thumbs-up their own content, otherwise nobody will listen to them." In that sense the only way for a spammer to spam is if they contribute to killing spam in general, and it becomes a self-defeating business model.

It's a pretty nifty idea. PDF here:

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/credence/credence.pdf

Yeah, cluster analysis is a pretty great approach as long as you have enough users to cluster around, so often you have to have a non-social component to start things off for low amounts of users (rec more $$, Chinese, and/or San Mateo options because you liked Joy Luck Place; get more data; then rely more on social once you have data points.)

For things that mine Yelp, it's especially convenient because you can mooch data off of Yelp's social graphing. (Of course, scraping that would totally go against their ToS.)

Funny you would use that as an example! (Besides it being completely untrue). I avoid certain Burger King locations because I know how poorly they perform. Meanwhile, the reviews on Yelp actually reflect that franchise service can vary.

Let's address the pompous overtone of your post implying that fast food cannot be "good" and therefore should not receive 5-stars. Oddly enough your apparent attitude creates one of the major problems with rating systems. You seem to be a customer looking for a Michelin rated meal while ordering food served on a paper plate.

If I want fast food, 5 stars means something different than if I want a multi-course meal, means something different than if I want a slice of pizza, means something different if I want ethnic food.