The quantity of reviews is super important. Anybody can build a 5 star rating by getting 3 friends to post reviews. Do these restaurants with "mediocre food" have many reviews?

I like and have used Google reviews for a while after having had enough of Yelp's issues, to the point where I removed my many reviews from Yelp. However, I think Google has a ways to go to remove junk reviews. For example, 'Baguette et Chocolat' near Austin pissed off some open-carry person, who I think also runs a gun blog, last year by asking him to leave when he ignored their state-law-compliant signs prohibiting the same. He then proceeded to command his fans to leave bad reviews for this restaurant, and they complied in droves leaving useful gems such as 'Found out the owners are hoplophobes. Never giving them my business again.' . I spent quite a bit of time reporting these and I think many others did as well. Yelp shut down review logging for this restaurant fairly quickly at the time but I am not sure Google did anything - the above "review" is still present as of today. I am disappointed with Google but have come to realize that they embody the opposite of the motto: "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well." Edit: Google still allows logging reviews without comments, which further worsens the problem.

The volume of fake reviews is simply too much, and its much cheaper to create them, than it is to combat them. A good measure of this is, compare the prices for fake reviews on both platforms, I suspect Google will be significantly cheaper.

Its a tough problem to solve, no doubt, but Yelp chooses to error on the side of caution, and will sometimes flag legitimate reviews as "not recommended reviews" as a result.

The algorithm's are much stricter, and most such reviews will be automatically hidden by Yelp, under "not recommended reviews".

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Why-would-a-review-not-...