How did we find new restaurants before iPhone and Yelp?
In the old days, one needed to google something like ”best San Diego restaurants” to get a smorgasbord of questionable, often irrelevant restaurant guides. Eventually, finding a new restaurant entailed driving the restaurant strip of a city and settling for a chain brand like Red Lobster because it reduced the risk of a bad value meal (and of course, the chance for a really good meal)
Yelp has reached critical mass to highlight 4-5 star reviewed restaurants within a GPS-determined location via iPhone.
Every time I’m in a new city or neighborhood (even if it’s a mile away from home), I yelp for the next restaurant, and they are invariably all winners… many of them are located in non-descript strip malls and would have been easily overlooked.
Yelp suffers from three problems:
1) Shilling is possible, so restaurants and other services that have many reviews are more credible.
2) Reviews are skewed to "Good and cheap" and many of these merchants are overvalued on Yelp reviews. A 5 star review at a $15/meal restaurant should be placed in context with a 5 star review at a $75/meal restaurant.
3) It is rumored buying a Yelp subscription that places a merchant on the sponsored listings will allow them to "delete" poor reviews. (Only a rumor)
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