Google Maps stopped being a reliable way to find good restaurants a long time ago. Any time in my city when I see a place with a high rating and suspiciously large number of reviews, searching for "five stars" in the reviews inevitably finds customers helpfully mentioning that they got free food in exchange. I've even seen places advertise the bribe openly on Maps. It would be trivial to detect this and punish offenders, but Google chooses not to.

I've been mulling over starting a boutique social network focused on location reviews with real life friends exclusively.

I'll go against the grain slightly and say that usually Google ratings are quite reliable for me. At times I notice they're exaggerated and it usually coincides with someone coming to ask me to rate them at the end of the meal.

Not sure if it's a London thing. In my city neither I, nor the people I know rely on Google maps reviews for picking restaurants. We either know the place, follow a recommendation or try the place based on menu, price, looks, vibe, position etc.

A week ago I went to Venice and I only looked on Google maps to see what the menus and prices are, but I wasn't interested in the reviews themselves or the grade, bacause IMO, people have biases. One evening we went to one of the restaurants I spotted on Google maps but the rest of the evenings we wandered the streets, and picked what was close, if we liked the menus, the prices and the atmosphere.

One of the restaurants had only 3.4 grade on Google maps, few reviews and mostly locals ate there. The food was very good and the service was great.

I do not generally make my mind based on reviews from Google Maps, Booking, Amazon. Of course, if the overall grade is very low, I will give it some thoughts and maybe read some reviews. But generally I don't make a decision based on reviews.

Nicely done. I think from a product perspective it is interesting that:

- Humans really value authentic experiences. And more so IRL experiences. People's words about a restaurant matter more than the star rating to me.

- There is only one reason to go somewhere: 4.5 star reason. But there are 10 different reasons to not go: Too far, not my cuisine, too expensive for my taste. So the context is what really matters.

- Small is better. Product wise, scale always is a problem, because the needs of the product will end up discriminating against a large minority. You need it to be decentralized and organic, with communities that are quirky.

All this is, somehow, anethma to google maps or yelp's algorithm. But I don't understand why it is _so_ bad — just try searching for 'salad' — and be amazed how it will recommend a white table cloth restaurant in the same breath as chipotle.

There are many millions that want to use the product _more_ if it was personalized. Yet somehow its not.

The other commenter thought the work was silly, but I think it's brilliant. Keep at this!! You're making me hungry :)

> One practical problem I ran into early on is that Google Maps is surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines. A huge share of restaurants are labelled vaguely (“restaurant”, “cafe”, “meal takeaway”)

It's not only that; cuisines are also difficult to label as certain countries simple do not exist for Google when it comes to that.

I recall last year I wanted to change the type of "Alin Gaza Kitchen", my ex (closed now, unfortunately) fav. falafel place in Berlin from the non-descript "Middle-Eastern" to "Palaestinian" category.

I assumed this was available for any country/cuisine, like "German", "Italian" or "Israeli". But "Paleastinian" didn't exist as a category.

Nearest hidden gem to me is a Domino's Pizza...

Very interesting, ive always wondered how google decides to show restaurants or other POIs if they overlap and there is a large density.

Im sure they favour the ones that use google ads, but i would not think that they are bullying places a la yelp.

Anyway its pretty crazy that nowadays your success as restaurant is so dependent on one huge platform. (… and actually, lets not forget the delivery platforms also)

Google Maps or any other aggregator has an inherent interest in market participant diversity. A lot of suppliers would mean competition, which results in ad spend, which result in higher revenue for the aggregator. Same with Google Search.

It's an interesting equilibrium point. They want local businesses to suffer enough to pay up for ads. But also not too much that they die. A good local business that does not need to advertise because it is simply good is actually a burden to the aggregator even though it is exactly what the end users want to see.

In the past, when I was a in position to build a search engine, we took the trouble of always including organically ranked results that were genuinely good, regardless of whether we got paid or not. I felt it was a long term investment into creating real value for our end users and therefore our service.

Delivery apps like Grab and Uber Eats are even worse since they have even more perverse incentives (minimising delivery time and maximising 'sponsored' listings).

Other than being willing to scroll a lot, I haven't found any great ways to find new restaurants when using delivery apps, and I'm sure I use them far less because of the tedium involved. I think scraping listings and re-doing the algorithm yourself (as per post) is perhaps the best approach. E.g. Just being able to rank by user rating and filter for no less than 200 reviews and within 5km would be an outstanding improvement on the status quo, which is always the 50 closest restaurants to the delivery address - what a coincidence! - with a few 'sponsored' listings thrown in.