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I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for:

- good coffeeshops

- tacos

- Korean grocery stores

- places that have traditional style al pastor tacos

- finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store

- finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe)

- hot chicken

- canolis

and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info.

This tends to work for me as well but signal vs noise ratio has worsened over time. Despite Reddit's questionable decisions in the past years it still has useful information for all sorts of things.

Reddit's own search has become less reliable so I search via DDG like `<query> 'site:reddit.com'`, falling back to `!g <query> 'site:reddit.com'` if the former doesn't get me anywhere.

> Reddit's own search has become less reliable

Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile of shit

Yea I always just put in the question I want into DDG and then just add reddit in the end. It's so much better than any blog or anything because at least it gives the semblance of real users giving their opinion.

What is DDG?

DuckDuckGo

I like you.com search better, as their reddit app yields less fussy results than the reddit search itself and i normally don't have to append reddit at the end of my query.

That's because Reddit is one of the few places left on the web that is open (aka: not a walled-garden like Facebook) and has people talking to people without financial incentive. HN is another.

Reddit is changing fast though. It's becoming more walled-off every day as they push to become the next Pinterest, and it's increasingly plagued with spam and bad actors.

Google brought this upon us by lifting SEO spam websites to the front page while pushing down helpful websites written by humans without incentive, like Ask MetaFilter.

Reddit is still fine on smaller, more niche subs. The larger they are, the more painful it gets though.

I have found that this only works if you take recommendations with the understanding that you're almost always getting "the reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated thing, and have bonded over that to the point that other recommendations between each other are heavily weighted and rapidly creates a "go to" response.

Example: check r/sandiego for [insert type of taco] suggestions. There should be thousands of options if you're actually from San Diego but you'll get 5 or 6 at most that stand out a lot, and 1 or 2 that get the most up votes or responses.

Now that may in fact be the "best" (depending on your and their definition) but you might also find that it's just the restaurant that has the most interesting social media presence, or the one you go to in order to signal that you're "one of us". Maybe that's exactly what you want, maybe it's what you want to avoid, but either way it's important to know the mood and trends of the subreddit as well as general reddit culture (and don't tell me it doesn't exist).

I think this is a really good observation, and "bonded over" is a good term. At the extremes, people will even recommend the thing and disparage other options when they haven't tried either one themselves. They're just trying to be part of the group.

Edit: A couple more real examples off the top of my head:

- In some circles, everyone recommends getting a Shure SM7B + a Cloudlifter for recording voice. It's not a terrible option but not really better than many other mics (many of which are higher gain, removing the need for the separate preamp), and even if selecting an SM7B, depending on your audio interface you may not need the Cloudlifter. It's just a preamp, not magic.

- On Reddit's /r/NewZealand, everyone loves Whittaker's chocolate and hates Cadbury. Whittaker's is locally owned and honestly is better than Cadbury, but from reading the discourse you'd think Cadbury was completely disgusting. Any sort of moderate opinion (e.g. liking both) is not allowed.

Everyone knows it's Tacos El Gordo obviously /s

So your observation is spot-on, that a subreddit community will produce unbalanced opinions due to groupthink. Likely true of any active community forum that would give recommendations such as this.

However, if I was looking for recommendations about a good taco place when visiting San Diego, I would bet that the groupthink recommendations of an active San Diego subreddit would be vastly superior to what you'd get on Google.

Unfortunately, this points to gamification of reddit recommendations as being a major target for the same folks wrecking web search results with their SEO blogspam garbage.

>... "the reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated thing

One way to stop this is sort by controversial. It allows you to see what the hivemind votes down at the top.

I also find city subreddits can be much more polarizing and needing controversial sort vs interest subreddits. The only common thing city subreddits share is geography so you get wildly different opinions which controversial sort helps with. The subreddits dedicated to an interest are much more susceptible to the reddit answer.

The other option is search for an /r/askvegas or similar -- if a city subreddit has a dedicated subreddit for questions you can usually get better answers on the asking subreddit, but they are closer to the reddit answer than a general city subreddit will give you.

You need to be careful about reading the subreddit rules when you do this though. In my for-locals subreddit tourists asking questions like this were a plague, even when there was a very clear and prominent rule forbidding any kind of tourism content.

Also important to at least try searching at first. So many people thought they had a super original question but it'd really been asked and answered to death already.

Coincidentally, the top post today on /r/SanDiego was a guy asking about the best burger in town and the mods ripped it down, saying "Nice try, zonie."

that's why we have a reddit app inside https://you.com - you can set your preference for it once and boom, you'll get results from reddit whenever relevant.

And reddit works because it's not an algorithm that decides which post is good, it's people with upvotes. And that in turn can be used by search engines.

Maybe that's what would fix Google. Up&down-votes for web results. Would probably be the easiest way to penalize bad sites and promote good niche pages. But after they removed downvoting in Youtube, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

When I visited my mom in Romania, I was amazed that hair dressers filled *exactly this purpose*. It almost felt like you were "Googling" for 30 minutes and getting a haircut as a side-effect.

Customer: How is the newly opened Spa?

Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold.

Not limited to Romania. Librarians are also pretty fabulous for local information and free.

this is so true! when i first moved to the USA, a librarian in austin texas was so incredibly helpful to me in sorting out/understanding the "i've just moved to the USA" process. i knew not even a handful of people and she was so selfless and generous in her efforts to help me navigate pre-web then-INS and TX state bureaucracy as a 0day new person here.

> call up someone and ask for some simple advice

> best hotel pool in vegas.

How is finding the best X at something from I assume hundreds if not thousands of choices, a simple question ? In particular, would asking any human give you the actual answer ?

At best we’d be in the same situation as looking at guide books or Michelin guide kind of rankings, created with human oversight but static in nature. More probably we’d get the most reputable hotel with no actual evaluation if it is effectively better than the myriads of others.

And that’s without digging into what you value in pool experiences vs what any evaluation system took as criteria to rank them.

I think this is an example of how we are trying very hard to simplify problems that are inherently complex. And sometimes it kinda seem to work, so people start forgetting it still is complex and rebuilding it from scratch means reapplying magic on it again.

How could it possibly be only a few bucks to answer questions like this though? A human would have to be doing the research and writing for you. If that human is trying to answer a query a minute to earn a reasonable wage then your results are going to be rushed and poor. If the human takes enough time to find a good answer then the search will need to cost enough to make it worth the time of a skilled researcher.

I could see a "virtual assistant" version of this where you pay fifty dollars and send a request like "Reservations in Vegas for these dates at a hotel with good pool."

There used to be a search engine in the mid 2000s that was just like this.

It was called ChaCha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)

Acquired by Google in 2010 and ...

Fifty million dollars would change my life. I would take a guaranteed fifty million dollars payout over one in ten chance to get a billion dollars.

What are the chances that I cumbents will stand by idly as the "next Google" just takes over? Best case I can think of is the incumbent imitates the upstart and becomes better.

Yep. That was the idea. 'voice assistants' came along, smart phones took off, and cell speeds became fast enough to make ChaCha untenable.

Source: worked at ChaCha.

Wow where did you go after! AskJeeves?

The future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix of trust to retrieve review scores, etc.

Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the reviews from other HN users ...

"Trust networks" are literally the past, that's literally how humanity has worked ever since its inception

Except for some difference, like how you don't have to tell someone that you need their opinion.

history rhymes

Thats basicaly current situation but we dont use "trust" word to describe it but we use "follow" word

I agree with everything you said about the spam blog problem.

And yet Travelocity (and others) would have told you how terrible Circus Circus is in five minutes or less.

22,000 reviews, 3.2 stars out of 5, among the worst in Vegas (among major hotels) with a gigantic number of reviews. Its room rate alone helps you to begin immediately forming a good conclusion about its quality. This isn't a subtle thing.

Oh, but that's not realiable, one might say. Yes it is. It does a great job of approximating the quality of the hotel in question, and it's an exceptionally easy and fast means to narrow with. It isn't a perfect approach (is it really a 3.1 or 3.3 star quality?!?) and doesn't need to be, it just needs to let you know that Circus Circus is garbage, and it does exactly that.

Not sure if it's changed, but Oyster was historically known for really detailed Vegas hotel reviews. They'd surely have a list of best hotel pools.

https://www.oyster.com/las-vegas/hotels/

You can also get some decent mileage out of Booking.com and checking reviews for keywords. That won't help you quickly find the best hotel pool, but it will help you find out what people think of a specific hotel's pool (e.g., Circus Circus).

> So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service.

I love the idea. However…

You have invented an influencer hellscape. Not to mention the complete subjectiveness of so many things.

Imagine all these humans will be paid / corrupted by the destinations if they hold outsize influence

I can empathize exactly. Trying to do a bit of research on an upcoming trip seems like something that should be fun or at least not feel like an overly burdensome exercise. But as you point out it's a giant time drain filled with frustration. Everything from the booking sites that create a high pressure experience("3 people are looking at this room right now!") to the influencer chum pages that seem to be more about marketing their brand than providing practical information. You can lose two hours trying to research a trip and still not got anywhere. A service where you could talk to local people would be great. That's a service would be worth paying for, like a travel advisor.

A paper was posted here a few days ago about how to use individual tasks on crowdsourcing marketplaces to put together articles on complex topics: https://joe.cat/images/papers/knowledge-accelorator.pdf

I can imagine the first two steps of their process working for a human-assisted search machine. Specifically, the "finding sources of information" and "filtering information" steps. But, I'd imagine the human workers would still need more complex / configurable search tools than Google (which is probably what the workers in the study used to find their sources).

> So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service.

So...a travel agent? Nothing beats talking to a person one on one who is actually trained to do this stuff and personalize it to their client.

We've come full circle.

If you don't mind staying on Fremont Street (I prefer it to the Strip), the Golden Nugget has a pretty nice pool setup (complete with waterslide) and is a "nice" place to stay.

Amex has a really good concierge that handles this. And it's free with most cards. Absolutely underrated, especially when you're traveling internationally

> For example: best hotel pool in vegas.

I get what you're saying but, does anyone really need the "best" here? why not "good" or "great"?

You get the same crap results with those searches.

All review site have become some version of "link to amazon and include their description as your in detail review"

Isn’t that called a travel agent?

Are travel agents particularly well travelled and well enough that they'd know specifics about hotel pools in Vegas?

Pre-Expedia, travel agents would be able to tell you these things (at least for popular destinations)

Exact same experience except with Iceland. Google "top attractions in Iceland" and you get a bunch of garbage posts telling you about the Blue Lagoon. I ended up reading an entire book on iceland tourism and perusing many blogs and reaching out to many friends, and the Blue Lagoon is definitely not one of the top spots.

Feels like you asked the wrong question. You asked about the best pool, not the best hotel with a good pool. But even do, I've read many sites that tell a little bit the hotel when I search for the best pool. Not one of them listed circus circus

Have you given WikiVoyage a shot? It has been quite helpful in some occasions.

See [1] for Vegas, for example.

[1]: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Las_Vegas

"best x in vegas" + reddit

Duh.

This maybe works for Vegas, but what about places without a large demographic on reddit, or where the locals wouldn't be writing about these things in a language you speak?