[contactdick]

I agree, in the internet age I was hoping searching would become more efficient so that 'find good restaurant in xxx' was a sensible thing to type into a search box. Currently there's too much noise so places like yelp are a much better option. Interestingly Yelp hasn't taken off here yet.

[kls]

To me sites like Yelp and Urban Spoon have too much signal to noise ratio as well. I readily admit I am a food snob. And not the tasteless, this place is expensive so I have to be seen here type. I am very critical of food. I have a culinary degree and I have a refined pallet when it comes to food. I eat at hole in the wall joints as well as 5 star restaurants and the only thing I care about and judge a restaurant by is the quality of the food.

I am constantly depressed by the high ratings that establishments receive on sites like Yelp and Urban Spoon only to go in and find that they are average at best. I have been to places with 95% positive ratings on Urban Spoon and walked away very disappointed in the quality of the food. I have seen fast food restaurants like KFC and Taco Bell with 9x% ratings on Urban Spoon. Meanwhile I have went to places with a 60% to 70% rating and the food has been out of this world.

When those sites where small, unknown and mainly frequented by foodies, it seemed like the quality of the ratings where much better, now they are little guarantee of quality. Now days, I really only use them to tell me what is around and to weed out the really bad joints. If a place is below 50% positive review I avoid it above it and it is a crap shoot.

The problem is people go out for dining experiences for a variety of reasons and they rate a restaurant for all those varieties. Being a foodie, I could care less about anything but the taste of the food. If it has the explosion of flavor I am looking for, I don't care if I am eating it on a paper plate in a plastic chair. Ambiance has no value to me where others it does. The demeanor of the wait staff has no value to me (other than the amount they will be tipped) where others it does.

They really need multiple flags on these sites so that people can rate the different aspects accordingly (I have not been on Yelp in a log time, so forgive me if this has been done). For me the only flag that counts is quality of food the rest of the weight being put into the positive and negative rating is just noise for me. While others may value something totally different and want to see the ratings weighted based on that.

These sites are a great start, but they have a long way to go, before that can seat you at the table you want to be at, with any degree of accuracy. The only value I have found is that they prevent you from ending up in a place that is really really bad. Then again Taco Bell has 9x% rating in my town, so even that is not a guarantee.

[thenomad]

Oddly Tripadvisor is much, much more reliable, at least for me. Where I live (Edinburgh, Scotland) the top 10 or so restaurants listed are indeed, uniformly, excellent quality - and all the Michelin starred places in the city are in the top 20.

True, the Michelin places don't come right at the top, but I'd defend most of the places that do come higher up as offering as good a dining experience considering price and variable taste. Sometimes (often) you're just not in the mood for a £200 tasting menu.

[tibbon]

Agreed on all parts. I'm a Yelp Elite member and I have had to learn how to read the reviews with a certain... distrust?

Some people will always knock down any place, no matter how good the food is, on price alone. That 5-star french place? Terrible! They charged $8 for a side of something!

You learn who reviewing you can trust and who you can't. I've recently moved to Columbus Ohio and I've found that people here have no taste for Sushi. You could take some gum off your shoe, put it on some rice and they'd think it was good and exotic. Places that have solid 4-star reviews here for sushi taste worse than stuff I'd get from random Trader Joe's in Boston that had been sitting there for 2 days.

So it goes both ways. I generally look for things about the service (a big one to me, and something that this down just doesn't know anything about either it seems), plus a little about the food quality. I wish it was the other way, but generally except for the basic description of their varieties and pricing I can't trust the reviews.

[freshfunk]

I'm an avid user of Yelp and find the overall ratings to be usually quite accurate. The caveat, though, is that the restaurant/business needs to have a sufficient numbers of reviews so that all of the top and bottom end outlier ratings are negated by the overall average score.

Also, keep in mind that the ratings are based on the complete experience not just the food. If someone had great food but a bad experience with the waiter, they may have no problems leaving 1 or 2 stars. Crap food with awesome service could get 4 stars.

It's Yelp, not Zagat or Michelin. If you use it appropriately, it will work for you.