There needs to be Netflix style predictive reviews: "Based on Yelpers with review histories like yours, our guess for your rating is 4 stars." And maybe a rottentomatoes-esque separate average rating using only ratings from "top Yelpers."

I always wish I could filter out vegetarians, and I'm sure they feel the same way about me.

I'll go to a vegetarian restaurant, but only if non-vegetarians say it's good.

And Sushi. Unless the fish is literally rotting on the plate, Americans will pretty much give high marks to just about any Sushi hut.

Where in the USA are you referring to? You can find better sushi in New York City than you can in Tokyo (and the reviews reflect that fact).

[citation needed]

I've always wanted a "friend circle" yelp where It showed you recommendations from friends of friends/people you know so you could temper the rating with what you know about the person reviewing.

Foursquare does this. Explicitly shows you your 4sq/Swarm friends' relationships to the place (have they been there? saved it to a list? said they 'like it' or 'dislike it'?), and then in the list of tips/reviews surfaces the stuff your friends have left before others.

When searching, you can even filter for "only show me places my friends have been".

I believe Google+ actually does this.

I've seen 5 star reviews with LOOKS COOL IM GOING NEXT MONTH, like, WTF?

Also the system is not consistent enough to really tell anything about the experience. There are reviews that had 4-5 stars that only had simple statements like "it was pretty good" to multiple paragraphs about how one tiny part of the meal not being satisfactory and had 1 star.

I feel like a lot of the people who write reviews on Yelp are not really qualified to do so(not that there's a lot at stake..)

I keep saying. Yelp needs private ratings, and it needs detailed rating for Elite reviewers. A bad review is a review that praises the meal, but gives 1 star because they couldn't accommodate 8 people in a timely manner. That's all over Yelp. You have to separate the food, the decor and the service.

Reviews across the Internet have a problem of all averaging out to 3.5-4.5 stars. There needs to be some serious innovation in review/recommendation engines for user submitted reviews to be valuable to other users.

> a problem of all averaging out to 3.5-4.5 stars

This is not a problem, it's sampling bias. If you went to restaurants randomly, then your average rating would be lower. But if you purposely select restaurants that you tend to like, then the average must be higher. Same for books, music, and everything on Amazon.

This is where Netflix ratings really shine. The Big Lebowski on my Netflix profile shows as five red stars. On my wife's, it's two red stars. Netflix guesses that I would really like the movie, while they don't think my wife would enjoy it much at all. And that's completely true. However, they give her a rating of five red stars for Masterchef, a show she actually loves. They give me four red stars, because I've rated other reality shows and other cooking shows lower in the past.

So if Yelp had that kind of thing, this person rated McDonald's highly, they'll probably like Burger King. This person liked Subway but hated McDonalds, so they'll probably like Jimmy John's but not Wendy's. Even more specifically, this person liked Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich, they'll probably like Subway's sriracha buffalo chicken sub.

That's the kind of investment and innovation that drivers user interaction.

I've gone to highly regarded famous restaurants that should have easily been 5 star.

The 2 and 3 star complaints? Trivial crap.

"Sure the food is great, but other restaurants also have great food, 3 stars."

"There is this other restaurant on <other side of the country> that has food as good at this restaurant, and my meal was $30 cheaper!" (for a $200 meal)

"I had to call ahead to get reservations, they couldn't just seat me, 2 stars"

Crap like that ends up with Michelin Star rated restaurants having equal "star" ratings on Yelp as the local Subway.

Well, stars should be a function of both expectations and service, so I don't think it's wrong for both a Michelin Star restaurant to be rated equal to a Subway.

They're probably measuring the wrong things. Maybe they should have something similar to the AirBnB / eBay ratings, which measure a lot of categories.

"Gave me extra cheese for free on my sub!" 5/5

If the reviews fail to provide an accurate assessment of the product's value to the potential consumer considering the purchase, then it's a problem. Sampling bias would be the root cause of that problem.

Something like a system that lets people say "This restaurant is better than that restaurant" or some other simple way to establish a partial ordering?

I don't trust them either, but I think that's OK. Just looking at pictures of the food on Yelp is a pretty big thing. But besides that, the comments can tell you things you otherwise might not know, like certain things are only available on some days of the week, or the house specialty is such-and-such, that sort of thing. It's good for facts, skip all the "We found ourselves peckish on a recent gloomy Thursday afternoon..." garbage.