The 7 years that google owned zagat correlated with a massive improvement in the quality of their reviews.

I have done the google maps local guide program a bit and the way it is structured is great. The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews.

A few months ago a friend asked me what I was up to, so I sent them a photo of 2 flights of beer in an attempt to get them to meet me at the bar. later, Maps asked if I liked the bar and wanted to upload the photo. For the last 2 months that photo has been the official picture of the bar and received over 250k views. Minimal input or interruption for me, large return for google.

> The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews.

Funny, I hate when google asks me this. It feels like an invasion of my privacy, a reminder that they are tracking everything I do.

It only does this if you have location services turned on. You actually told Google it was ok to use your location to provide location specific services. That's not what I would call "tracking", which implies something clandestine.

Google requires this permission to do anything remotely location-based and uses it extremely liberally. I shouldn't have to agree to have them link my photos to the restaurant I'm in just so I can save a home location for driving directions.

It doesnt post anything without your permission. And you can long hold the notification to suppress and never see them again. It's not that big of a deal

Meh. I remember we used to use Yelp to find the best restaurants in a city. It worked incredibly well.

It doesn't anymore, but Google maps is not better. For example, I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy!

I tend to blame SEO first and ads / paid promotion second.

If you're looking for good restaurants in a city, TripAdvisor is probably your best bet. It does have the downside of terrible location-based search though (what decent restaurants are within 50m of my current position?).

TA is pretty close to last on my list for restaurant search. The top of every ranking in any even mildly touristy city is going to be spammed to hell and back. It's basically a list of "where do tourists go who can be preferentially selected into leaving a review?"

(TripAdvisor-owned) TheFork, aka La Fourchette, is the way to go in Europe. The quality of the reviews on that site is impressive, and there are numerous torch-the-unicorn style discounts to be had. Europeans take their food seriously :-)

Also chowhound but it's not always up to date

Chowhound basically got destroyed a few years ago when it got acquired and redesigned into an unusable mess, and now traffic has cratered. Some of the regulars split off into new sites - HungryOnion (mostly SF Bay) and FoodTalkCentral (mostly LA), but neither seems to have the critical mass that Chowhound used to have that made it a useful global resource.

> I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy!

That says more about Brooklyn than Google Maps.

While ragging on Brooklyn hipsters can be fun, I promise you, there's real wing joints scattered all over the place.

Yes, there's also probably a place doing a chicken skin crackling with a capsaicin blue cheese emulsion as well, but you can also just get some wings.

Came here to agree with you. Tons of great wings spots here.

Also, The Infatuation is great for NYC restaurant reviews.

This happens to me too, also if you say the city and the name of the place it will definitely not find locations that are outside the official city border, even if it's 25 feet from that border. So crazy too because I can literally be next to a restaurant, ask for it, and not find it.

The other thing that absolutely drives me bonkers - Google maps keeps routing me to the back of something, like literally to the truck entrance of whatever grocery store or restaurant I am routing to. You would think they would employ ML to visually figure out where the parking lot is vs the truck entrance.

Have you compared Google maps' results to those of Yelp's in Brooklyn? Did they show you anything that Google Maps didn't show?

Last time i checked Yelp was not available outside USA (checked while I was in India/Japan ~two years ago) while Google maps tons of data in those locations.

Google maps has definitely improved, but they are even worse than most review sites in the near worthlessness of their review scores. The vast majority of restaurants are rated between 4 and 5 stars, with the difference between a 4.1 and 4.6 being huge - the former being 50/50 that its good, the latter being the sort of place worth waiting in line for. The closest Michelin starred restaurant to me is rated 0.2 points higher than the forgettable greek restaurant across the parking lot from where I work, and less than 1 point better than taco bell.

Well sure, because a rating doesn't measure how good a restaurant is compared to all other restaurants.

Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from.

It's also unfair to rate both a $1 coffee and a $8 coffee on the same basis, it's clear that the cost constraints put pressure on how good you can make that coffee. It's not unfair for an $8 coffee to be higher quality, but worse rated than a $1 coffee.

I rely and rate on Google Maps excessively, using it to plan trips and to eat out. It has consistently been the best source of information. All you have to do is first filter for the type / class of cuisine you want.

>Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from.

See above, but I find the opposite to be often true. I see reviews for restaurants I am very familiar with, that I know to be excellent and basically the best option for innovative cuisine in a 100 mile radius, which say "Way overpriced small portions". Pretty clear that whoever wrote that review was operating outside their preferred restaurant class.

> Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from.

In the US, ratings measure, in significant part, race/ethnicity/subculture from which the restaurants clientele is drawn, because White Americans give higher ratings for similar descriptive satisfaction levels than other demographics (tending toward not unacceptable = 5/5.). Asians give the lowest scores for similar descriptive satisfaction levels.

This shows up nicely in Japan's ubiquitous review site Tabelog, where ratings above 3.5 are very good and above 4.0 are unobtainium.

https://www.eater.com/2017/2/21/14686118/tokyo-tabelog-resta...

Exactly. If you look at the rating for a McDonald's, the rating is "how clean is the bathroom and does the ice cream machine work?"

I never look at aggregate scores (unless, I suppose the score is "one star"). Instead I read individual reviews, and keep reading until I'm reasonably confident I'm seeing a consistent pattern (either good or bad). This is time consuming but seems to work for me. One example of why this approach is necessary: very often people will give a restaurant a low score with a comment like "Way overpriced" or "Portions too small". Well, I actually want to pay more money if I get significantly better food (often, but not always, there is correlation), and I don't really care for huge portions.

I will not tolerate taco bell slander on this web forum

I bet that forgettable greek place is in fact excellent.

Yep. I check both. I found Google ones are on average inflated by half star.

Their CEO was on NPR recently complaining about how Google Maps was eating their lunch and how it wasn't fair.

I used to work for a company that owned a bunch of traditional broadcast stations. The day the CEO got up in front of the local branch of the company and asked the question (roughly) "How do we get people to watch broadcast TV again?" I knew it was time to get out there. The company is still around and probably has enough inertia to keep going for a long while, but with that kind of thinking in the leadership, it's pretty much a zombie.

He's free to find the Google Campus on Google Maps and leave it a 1-star review.

When I used to use Yelp, I found the reviews are so hard to wade though.

So many:

- I had a bad time .. once.

- This restaurant isn't as good as this other place that is twice as expensive.

- We had to wait a "long time".

- The food sucked (because they don't like the kind of food they serve...).

- This place sucks and you should go to this other completely different place.

There's a local restaurant known for it's macaroni and cheese. That and a few sides dishes are all they serve, and it's all fantastic.

One of their bad Yelp reviews was that their beer list of local microbrews wasn't extensive enough.

I don't find reviews helpful at the best of times, food is simply too subjective. Some people want "authentic" dishes, others want anglicized (think texmex) versions, each will give poor rating to the other. Some people will want something sweet others will find the sweetness too strong. Everyone has a different definition of "too spicy". "Restaurant" is often to granular too, sometimes a good place will have some bad dishes, should I care about the reviews of people that bought those dishes?

For me finding good restaurants is still a trial and error process that technology can't improve on.

It could use your ratings of restaurants to inform which reviewers to give more weighting to when giving you reviews of other restaurants.

Google maps is doing this now. I hope it catches on.

That would be nice.

I'd love to not see all the reviews from "This guy who thinks Dominoes Pizza is the best pizza."

Like I might eat it too and it's ok... but man I don't want that guy's opinion on other pizza places.

I do wonder how a system like that might evolve ... if it even does. Google News determined I like a certain sports team. I do not, but it shows me news from them endlessly and not the team I like no matter how much direct feedback I provide..... Tastes change, that system could make Maps kinda useless if someone's tastes change but they get a bunch of garbage reviews.

- Our waiter, Bob, was really good. Bob took our order, brought our food, and kept our beverages filled. Bob is a great waiter. <signed> totally-not-Bob.

Also "the staff is so RUDE!". Any review which uses the word "rude" can be safely ignored, because it's written by the kind of person who considers it rude that his/her water glass went unfilled for nearly 30 seconds after being emptied.

I always wonder about that, like who is the rude person... really hard to know.

I don't think I've ever encountered "rude" staff. Maybe just dumb luck but it's just not something that has occurred to me where I thought that.

"Rude"ness is almost always a feedback loop, and my guess is it more often than not starts with a customer being rude, and then builds from there.

Like you, I basically never have encountered a restaurant employee that I would say is rude.

I see many negative reviews that I suspect are from people acting in the interests of competitive restaurants.

I always thought that some of the bad reviews must be from ex-employees.

With so many good restaurants, why would I go back to one where I had a bad time?

That's not the question. It's natural not to want to go back to somewhere something bad happened. The question is why anybody else would care about bad luck that someone had, as opposed to a bad experience that was representative.

There is no canonical bad experience. The best estimate is the ratio of good to bad reviews, and most will be from a single experience, unless people suddenly start volunteering to visit restaurants that treated them poorly the first time...

I think that relates to my point in the sense, I really don't care about reviews if they're that ephemeral / arbitrary.

People might post a lot of those, it might be human nature to some extent to do it.... but that kinda fits my point that the reviews become useless at that point.

I like Google Reviews too and use it more than Yelp. Especially when Yelp forces me to download the app.

But I find it difficult to generate a link directly to Google reviews for a particular place... I can link to the Google maps results, but a review page by itself to read/write reviews would be nice.

Yelp still has the best (as in the most comprehensive) reviews of restaurants. Google's reviews are littered with one sentence reviews which is rather unfortunate.

Having said that Yelp is absolutely, positively removes negative reviews from places that pay it for promoting. Having written a few and having opened tickets after those reviews disappeared I found the fun tricks they use to be able to claim that they don't censor reviews. They absolutely do. The only way to ensure that your review stays up is to post a copy of your check as a part of your review ( that's why you are seeing them these days ) which of course makes you totally identifiable and open to the lawsuits. Otherwise whoever "owns" the listing can dispute the review by claiming the person who left it is not sharing his or her personal experience.

When I was in physical therapy about a year ago they told me to leave reviews in Google rather than Yelp because research showed it was more effective. I found it hard to believe since my peers and I both used Yelp way more, but I find this recent behavior from Yelp abhorrent so it may be time to switch

Does google maps have a search by rating, open time, and so on?

I usually eat dinner around the time most restaurants have closed in the area. I find when I search google maps it gives me places closed, and often the hours in their listings are off. To be fair, hours have improved quite a bit in the last year.

I need a way to filter what I'm looking for.

Try "X open now".

The Google alternative to Yelp is Local Guides: https://maps.google.com/localguides

You can earn points and level up for your contributions (reviews, photos), but they don't have anywhere near the incentive structure as Yelp yet.

I don't like the incentives that things like "starred" users (aka local guides) creates. I feel like it's only a matter of time before they become the G Maps version of "influencers", who get paid to post glowing reviews.

I'm much more likely to trust reviews from regular users. They don't have to be well written, just descriptive enough for me to make a decision.

I wonder sometimes if Google Maps does better than Yelp because it tracks where people actually eat, not where they say they eat.

and if they search for digestion medicine after they eat.

Lately I’ve noticed Google Maps had better images. Not sure if they scrape some of them but they didn’t overlap with Yelp. Google Maps reviews also tend to be more positive.

The two bad things I noticed were fake guides and a few bogus sounding comments.

I've noticed Google Maps tends to have more recent reviews as well compared to yelp and newer restaurant information is updated faster.

Really wish they'd make it easy to show images of menus in restaurants. I usually use Yelp for easily viewing photos of different aspects from interior/exterior to menu, etc.

Google Maps is also shoving Grubhub down our throats. Every time I try to call a restaurant's phone numer in the new Maps app, I end up accidentally opening a Grubhub tab in Chrome.

I... can't confirm this at all. Opened maps, clicked on a restaurant, selected "call", and brought up the phone app. The only way I can get to a delivery provider is to click a button marked "Delivery". And even there it seems to be suggesting DoorDash to me, even for restaurants that I can find listed on GrubHub's site.

But Google Maps is owned by Google. You’re basically exchanging the devil for Hitler.

It’s an improvement, but still bad.