This is completely Anecdotal, but, as a foodie, I find the Google reviews have a higher aggregate "crowd wisdom" than Yelp. I am constantly shocked by the lack of correlation between rating and quality in the restaurants I look up on yelp.

Before it died, UrbanSpoon was better than Yelp too.

TripAdvisor is the worst because it's 99% tourists, so you never get a local's opinion of what's good in their area.

Just my 2 cents.

Google reviews have orders of magnitute higher counts compared to yelp throughout Europe and likely elsewhere outside the US.

I don't know if any of this is carryover from Zagat but I tend to agree. Zagat was quirky in its own way with the brief summations of crowdsourced (before that was a term) comments on restaurants--but, because it was definitely oriented toward foodies, I found it very reliable.

I do find Yelp better than throwing darts at a dartboard. But especially if reviews are thin or the restaurant caters to the sports bar crowd or whatever, it's not much better.

I honestly don't think any of the crowdsourced sites are great. But it's hard to get much from other sources outside of some major cities, especially if you're just looking for something simple.

Zagat had enormous grade inflation. There were even studies done on it - unfortunately the name of the paper currently escapes me and googling only provides explanation of why it is happening rather than the data source.

Yelp's biggest issue is Yelp Elite crowd. It wields sufficient power in local markets that people want to belong to it and in order to belong one does not just need to review lots of places, one needs to review them quite well i.e. lots of positive spin ( look at distribution of 4-5 stars vs. 1-2 stars in ratings given to restaurants by Yelp Elite ). So either all the places are amazing or as the group Elites have a collective hive mind.

>Zagat had enormous grade inflation.

Yes, but so does pretty much every rating system of this type. Most 3-star items on Amazon aren't very good. [1]

Back when they used a 30 point system, I found that anything above 21 or so on Zagat was almost always pretty decent. Yelp seems to be around 4-star+ with less consistency.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1098/

> Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.

I'm not sure what the problem is, in both cases reviews are crowd-sourced. So what level of professionalism are you expecting from websites where anybody can leave a review?

Are these journal peer-reviews that I've missed? I don't know of any certificate courses that allows one to comment on the ambiance of a restaurant.

I wouldn't say Google reviews are ideal but I've found them to be a lot more reliable than the alternative.

For example, Booking.com, etc.

Completely the opposite for me.

At least booking.com allows reviews only when you booked. And when I read the comments most point out real problems or benefits of the different housings.

AirBNB reviews on the other hand are painfully useless.

And Google is the worst, with a shitload of review from people that look like that probably didn't even went to the place, or just disliked being denied on a discount of something, so you jget useless 5 stars review that say "best food ever" and 1 star reviews for "super rude server, worst restaurant ever" for the same average restaurant, and nothing in between to tell you what the place actually feels like or what food is good/bad there.

My experience is mainly limited to Hotels though and I've found 1 star reviews on Google tend to match my actual experience with bad hotels very closely.

I am based in Europe though so maybe this isn't a universal experience?