It surprisingly has up to date content where I live, and generally anything 4+ stars is good and below 3 stars is not too good. The individual reviews are usually not useful, but looking at patterns and trends of recent reviews can be useful if you know how to filter out the obvious BS and one-off overreactions.

The problem is a real lack of reviews for smaller places, especially outside the downtown area. Google Maps has more content there.

I agree, though the other issue for smaller places is that they are more susceptible to review-bombing by one disgruntled party (do we really need 6 reviews from 6 different people about how the same table had to wait an hour to get the check one time?) or "5 stars for 30% off" incentives (which I have unfortunately seen a number of, especially at small businesses trying to distinguish themselves).

Google Maps I still don't understand where they get a lot of reviews from in the first place. While some look like normal reviews, there's a lot that have no comments at all or comments completely unrelated to the place ostensibly being reviewed (or just cryptic things like "not good" or "good"). It's not a bad comparison to use alongside Yelp, but it's definitely led to more clunkers, especially for places with n<20 reviews.

I find that if a restaurant has 4.5 or 5 stars (assuming a decent number of reviews), typically it is very good. However, plenty of the places I eat/enjoy have 3 stars (none have 2 or 1). So I use it as a rough filter for that purpose.

It's also useful for seeing if particular menu items are good, since fake reviews don't typically get into that much detail (or at least there are other real reviews that would outweigh them in search results for that item).

FWIW, I live in silicon valley.

There's the ongoing meme that the best Chinese restaurants have 3.5 stars on Yelp- from the combination of 5 star reviews from people who love the food, and 1 star from people who didn't like the brusque service or didn't get the American Chinese food they were expecting.

There's a Malaysian/Chinese resto near me like that. It's an absolute sleeper of a place to have eat. Barely visible from the road, and connected to a supermarket (and they wheel in and out shopping carts from next door as they run out of ingredients during the day). My Japanese roommate at the time was turned onto it by his Korean boss, and I took my Chinese/Filipino/Indian/American coworkers there and then they started going there all the time.

The 1 star reviews complain about the organ meat, which there were totally grossed out by. "Beef tendon pho" is super legit, and what you get in Asia. You're in the wrong place if you expect American-Chinese fare.

It's super weird to me that people will leave a bad review because there were things on the menu they didn't like. I like some types of organ meat, and dislike others, but it would never even enter my mind to be like "2 stars because 40% of the menu is stuff I don't like". People are weird.

I have another comment in the thread which got downvoted by someone.

My take, having seen a lot of these posts on yelp, is that people leave such reviews because restaurants are offering something which they are not familiar with, or matches their notions of "normal". You see this less at restos which serve burgers and pizza, and more with places serving non-American food.

I just took a spin through the couple of Asian places in my town, and they have relatively high numbers of 1 star reviews. Digging into them, what you see a lot of are is complaints like:

"This is the worst Asian food I have ever had because (proceeds to describe exactly how the dish is supposed to be)". Also a lot of complaints about these Asian restaurants being "dirty" (which they aren't - as I'm only reading through places my wife and I go to / order from frequently). It was like this specifically with Asian food in the last town I lived in as well. I recall one complaint about how they romanized a Thai word, insisting "pad see ewe" was misspelled (ORLY!). It's bizarre. Mexican restaurants by comparison, get complaints about the food being too spicy, or the decor (at takeout places no less) being bad. And, of course, "dirty", which again, the places I frequent, aren't.

I can't help but conclude that people who write these reviews are judging things based on their own biases, of which they are not self-aware. A more harmless example is a review from a great Thai/Chinese resto where I used to live where someone suggested the place smelled "musty". Well - it was in a sublevel of a large building ("basement" is the word they used), but it was not in any way musty in the 10 years I spent going there. None of my friends ever took issue, even a good friend with a really sensitive nose.

At least in New York, it is. It’s less prone to the cost noise that infects the other rating services—where a 3 star could be due to bad food or someone being surprised by New York prices. (There is also a scourge of paid top ten articles that makes a simple search useless.)

The Apple Maps integration seems to be most of what's propping them up these days. It's especially infuriating because you can only see about 2 reviews before you're prompted to download the Yelp app for "full access".

I thought Apple was supposed to be working on their own review system or switching to a different service, but I haven't seen anything come of that.

Sometimes they show TripAdvisor reviews instead of Yelp.

Huh. Wonder if it's a regional thing?

I don't recall ever seeing that and I just checked about 25 places in my city and none of them had TripAdvisor.

Yes, I think so.

It's definitely regional. Here in Toronto, checking for few addresses around me I see a mix of

-Apple Maps native reviews

-Yelp

-OpenTable

And I'm definitely seeing a lot less Yelp than I used to. At least in Toronto, yelp is pretty much dead anyway. People mostly use Google Maps.

Apple Maps is the only place left where I see it, and I wish I wouldn't.

It seems Apple Maps and Pay could result in good reviews, because they'd all be tied together.

Why would you use Apple maps though?

I havent used since I missed a turn. Why not use google maps?

I use Apple Maps and do have some complaints, but I like when it tells you which lane(s) to be in as you approach freeway interchanges. Sometimes it's obvious where you're supposed to be (far right), but sometimes when consecutive exits are close together, you actually need to be 1 or 2 lanes over.

Google maps does that too?

"Use the left two lines to take exit 12 towards Buemont Street"

"Use the second from the right lane to continue on Sepulvada Drive"

On my iPhone, I either use Apple Maps or Waze. I'm pretty sure Waze doesn't offer this, though I haven't updated the app in a while.

No review site depending on users is perfect but I've found it's the best option for a quick "what's a good restaurant for x cuisine" in America.

I've found Google Maps or Tripadvisor to be too hit-or-miss especially when traveling abroad where Yelp isn't as prevalent.

I was going to ask the same. I thought this was very common knowledge for a rather long time.

I forgot it exists. Looking at a bunch of local restaurants, there has been essentially no activity since 2017, and Google and Facebook have orders of magnitude more reviews in every case.

I don't use Yelp to determine if a place is good or not.

I use yelp for personal entertainment, because the outraged, bombastic reviews are often hilarious in how just beneath the surface are classist, racist, xenophobic and jingoistic undertones. These are among the few reviews I believe 100% are actually real people!

I personally prefer more objective signals like the menu, pictures of the food, and pictures of the interior. Maybe I’m a snob but foods that people describe as “delicious” and “amazing” to me look greasy, salty, or altogether not much better than I could cook myself with basic cooking skills.

With the average palette you just need to sprinkle the right amount of salt and sugar to get "yummy" reviews. These people can't cook, barely know where food comes from, and have no way to judge food other than it being sweet (good) or not sweet (bad).