[mattzito]

Except that Google isn't doing the parsing, it's a third-party, who is then providing the data to Google (and a bunch of others). Sadly, mixed in with the parsed/PDF-scanned data is accurate data that was hand-edited or auto-uploaded from a restaurant POS or kitchen management system.

So, Google and these other companies, the option is - build it yourself and try to do better, or buy data from the companies that do this at varying degrees of quality, or don't have menu data at all. Except the last option, people _want_ menu data, it's one of the most common things people want to know about a restaurant.