[georgeecollins]

This is how I evaluate restaurants on Yelp. I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews. If they are things like the weather was bad, the prices are too high or the waiter was rude to me, I assume the place is pretty good. People without much taste love places with cheap food and extremely polite and fast service. I like good food.

Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.

[nicolas_t]

Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful.

And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.

[city41]

This seems to be the only approach that works anymore. Are all the negative reviews petty or entitled? Then probably the thing in question is fine.

[shric]

Next trick: solicit a flood of one star reviews for your business that all have trivial complaints beyond your control.