Economics is not a science. It's not really possible to apply the scientific method. How we value things has a serious impact too.
Don't get me wrong here. The study of economics is high value and definitely can yield insight we can put to good use, but it's not on par with science in the sense of getting answers.
I would argue the answers we seek lie more along the lines of corruption and how money in politics has empowered large enterprises to shape society to a much larger degree than we can say was generally intended. Surely, carving society into a bunch of what looks like a bunch of fiefdoms impacted growth in a negative way.
Secondly, the lack of effective representation ordinary people see in politics today has not made things better. Corruption has competed very well, pushing the voice of ordinary people, the weight of their concerns, off the table, leaving us all with a poor environment to prosper in.
As to Yelp, I don't recall the era before Yelp as an era of going to bad restaurants. For informal restaurants, we'd go to wherever friends had been, if the friends said they'd had a good experience. And for fancier restaurants, those were reviewed in the newspapers. Or if you lived in a college town, then every restaurant, even the informal ones, would get a review in the weekly. Like, for instance, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Independent would post a review of every restaurant, both the informal and the formal.
I think an honest appraisal of the Internet would have to look hard at its failure to live up to its promise, and why that happened. For most of the 20th Century it was assumed that if knowledge could become universal, then economic growth would increase, and yet the opposite has happened. The years since 2000 have seen below average economic growth and below average productivity growth. Figuring out why economic growth faltered when information was becoming abundant has to be one of the big questions that economics needs to answer.