I hesitate to suggest that this may indicate there aren't that many 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants. Even great resaurants in my area struggle to break the 4.5 barrier.
Changing the zoom level will typically show these missing results. For example, I just checked my neighborhood. There are 5 restaurants within a few hundred feet of each other rated 4.5+ stars. With my filters set to 4.5+ stars, when I zoom out a bit, 4 of the 5 restaurants disappear, and I instead see a handful of 4.1 and 4.3 star restaurants. One of the 4.3 star restaurants is literally next door to a 5 star and 4.5 star restaurant, which are hidden at that zoom level.
I thought maybe it's some kind of weighted rating, because it's showing me the 4.3 star restaurant with 1,100 reviews, instead of the 4.5 star restaurant with 600 reviews. So, perhaps Google thinks the additional number of reviews make up for the lower rating, and they rank it higher, even though I'm specifically asking to not see those results. However, it also shows a 4.4 star restaurant with 40 reviews, while hiding a 4.5 star restaurant with 90 reviews.
This is par for the course when it comes to modern recommendations though. Do you want to see Netflix movies released in the past 3 years? Or what about a simple list of top rated movies? Too bad, you can watch what we tell you to watch. It's a complete lack of respect for the user.
It could also be recent ratings; I think it is reasonable to weight old reviews lower than new ones given restaurants can change a lot over the months and years.
Perhaps. But then why not just say “no results found”? Because that might give the impression to the “average” user that Google is broken and isn’t solving their problem. To the more sophisticated user, Google is just meddling where they shouldn’t.
Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to the average.
Google long ago decided that "No results found" is never an acceptable response. Same with regular Google search. It will just choose arbitrary things to show you instead.
It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of these tools.
At least here where I live, Foodora and similar have ruined what was left of the Google ratings for any place offering take-away, because there's ton of 1 star reviews which concerns the transport.
At least viewing the most recent comments and reading the comment that goes with it helps figuring out if it might be a decent place or not... at least sometimes.
I thought maybe it's some kind of weighted rating, because it's showing me the 4.3 star restaurant with 1,100 reviews, instead of the 4.5 star restaurant with 600 reviews. So, perhaps Google thinks the additional number of reviews make up for the lower rating, and they rank it higher, even though I'm specifically asking to not see those results. However, it also shows a 4.4 star restaurant with 40 reviews, while hiding a 4.5 star restaurant with 90 reviews.
This is par for the course when it comes to modern recommendations though. Do you want to see Netflix movies released in the past 3 years? Or what about a simple list of top rated movies? Too bad, you can watch what we tell you to watch. It's a complete lack of respect for the user.