So this may just be a Greater Austin thing, but in the last 6 months we’ve gone to ~5 places that had really clearly bought reviews. I say this because the quality of the experience simply in no way matched what Google/Yelp suggested it would. I think people are starting to get really good at gaming these review systems.
It had happened before, but nowhere near as often… to the point where I no longer trust these sites to be anything close to an accurate view of quality. I’m talking about places with 2000+ reviews and a 4+ star rating that are literally dirty and selling some truly lousy food. I’m not talking about minor issues, I’m not that guy. I’m talking about places where I, an introvert, was so surprised that I literally called corporate in the one case where there was a corporate to complain. To be clear it was the first time I had ever called corporate for a restaurant chain in my life at pushing 35 and I eat out way more than I should.
I guess I’m going to what I used to do before review sites and just checking foot traffic (if a shitload of people are eating somewhere it probably doesn’t suck)?
I’m fine with turning this thread into a place where we generally complain about how the internet seems to be getting worse at finding us information rather than better. Because that’s very much the trend I’m noticing. Things like Google searches feel like they aren’t as good as they used to be for instance.
I think a lot of people also have bad taste in food and value different things when reviewing a restaurant.
One of my biggest pet peeves on Yelp is when people give like 3 star reviews and say like “the food was amazing, some of the best Tilapia I’ve ever had, but we had to wait 20 minutes for the check”. Basically I assume service is going to vary day to day and server to server, food less so. So stop giving me reviews based on which stoned 20 year old brought you your food. This applies double to delivery.
Yeah that was the old problem for sure and I was very good at filtering out the noise and adjusting reviews. But those were legitimate reviews. What I’m talking about now is places that probably would average 1-2 stars because they are dirty, the service is bad, and the food is probably expired buying hundreds of five star reviews that are straight up fabricated.
And the fabrications are relatively hard to spot. ‘I love the bread’ at an Italian place for instance. On arrival the bread was literally stale lol.
This is an interesting and likely accurate observation. In the past, the problem with reviews was the opposite. People generally were way more likely to go through the effort to leave a negative review than to do so after a positive experience, and you had to weight average scores accordingly. The trend seems to be changing, possibly correlated to businesses taking more ownership of the yelp/Google score and actively promoting customers to leave a review.
It is super prevalent in other industries too. For example, I write and am the editor for a website that covers the escape game and immersive theater industry. If you Google “escape room in (any city)” they will almost all be 4.5+ stars. Even the absolute worst venues have decent ratings. This happens for two reasons; the worst venues actively promote leaving 5 star reviews and sometimes even reward customers for doing so (very unethical imo), and because it is still a relatively young industry in the US there are a ton of first timers who review these awful venues not knowing that they are terrible.
I find myself using social media more to get an accurate feel for customer experiences, but even that requires a lot of filtering.
Took a bit of a road trip recently and found that if you did a quick cross reference to see what restaurants Yelp and TripAdvisor had in common, it usually translated into a pretty good recommendation. Almost always ignored Google because many of their suggestions never appeared (or were not as well regarded) on the other 2.
This was for moderately small cities like Richland, WA and Logan, UT fwiw.
I hadn’t considered using TripAdvisor. It seems probable to me that restaurants that are buying reviews would only bother to target google and/or yelp. I was already cross referencing those two sites against each other…
Has anyone had any bad experiences with tripadvisor reviews? I think that might be the thing that is actually carrying you here.
By the way I’d be absurdly grateful if anyone knows of a decent Indian place in the northern half of Austin. Seriously we’re like 1/8 and the one we sort of like is pretty meh and an hour away.
My wife and I travel extensively all over the world and we both think trip advisor tends to be the most accurate out of all of them and often times that goes for other things like hotels as well. Maybe for the reasons you say. As always YMMV.
ETA-Yes there is still lots of BS on TA but I personally think it is better than Yelp for accuracy.
While I agree that you can’t trust the reviews on these places, I think you’re a little behind the ball on noticing this. But yeah, I think most online reviews are bs now.
This is true, too. Even when reviews weren’t complete bullshit, one of the first warning flags I had against relying on yelp or similar places was that in towns I’m familiar with they would consistently rank places like Outback real high and restaurants I knew to be fantastic wouldn’t even be mentioned.
It wasn’t as widespread in Louisville where we moved from. Plus since we’d lived there for years we didn’t really check review sites all that often anymore. But yeah it’s become extremely obvious since moving to a new city.
I’ve just gone to the reddit page for pretty much any good sized town and asked for ideas - haven’t been disappointed yet, (I think) avoided some real turkeys.
Yeah I’m well aware Yelp is basically a protection racket. Online reviews are basically worthless at this point, which brings me back to word of mouth from people I know (lol no one in Austin almost 7 months in, I’m VERY social lol) and just being observant about what seems popular.
I’ve found restaurant reviews from newspapers to be highly unreliable because it’s basically just one data point and with the inconsistencies you mentioned it’s just not very accurate. Also they review like 5% of the restaurants in the world.
We should do a “best of” Yelp food reviews in here or maybe another thread. Some of these people blow my fuckin’ mind with all of their perceived injustices and microaggressions.