Hacker News Reader

Comment by tfha | Hacker News Reader

Meh. I remember we used to use Yelp to find the best restaurants in a city. It worked incredibly well.

It doesn't anymore, but Google maps is not better. For example, I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy!

I tend to blame SEO first and ads / paid promotion second.

View on HN

If you're looking for good restaurants in a city, TripAdvisor is probably your best bet. It does have the downside of terrible location-based search though (what decent restaurants are within 50m of my current position?).

(TripAdvisor-owned) TheFork, aka La Fourchette, is the way to go in Europe. The quality of the reviews on that site is impressive, and there are numerous torch-the-unicorn style discounts to be had. Europeans take their food seriously :-)

Also chowhound but it's not always up to date

Chowhound basically got destroyed a few years ago when it got acquired and redesigned into an unusable mess, and now traffic has cratered. Some of the regulars split off into new sites - HungryOnion (mostly SF Bay) and FoodTalkCentral (mostly LA), but neither seems to have the critical mass that Chowhound used to have that made it a useful global resource.

TA is pretty close to last on my list for restaurant search. The top of every ranking in any even mildly touristy city is going to be spammed to hell and back. It's basically a list of "where do tourists go who can be preferentially selected into leaving a review?"

> I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy!

That says more about Brooklyn than Google Maps.

While ragging on Brooklyn hipsters can be fun, I promise you, there's real wing joints scattered all over the place.

Yes, there's also probably a place doing a chicken skin crackling with a capsaicin blue cheese emulsion as well, but you can also just get some wings.

Came here to agree with you. Tons of great wings spots here.

Also, The Infatuation is great for NYC restaurant reviews.

This happens to me too, also if you say the city and the name of the place it will definitely not find locations that are outside the official city border, even if it's 25 feet from that border. So crazy too because I can literally be next to a restaurant, ask for it, and not find it.

The other thing that absolutely drives me bonkers - Google maps keeps routing me to the back of something, like literally to the truck entrance of whatever grocery store or restaurant I am routing to. You would think they would employ ML to visually figure out where the parking lot is vs the truck entrance.

Have you compared Google maps' results to those of Yelp's in Brooklyn? Did they show you anything that Google Maps didn't show?

Last time i checked Yelp was not available outside USA (checked while I was in India/Japan ~two years ago) while Google maps tons of data in those locations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com