Comment by mattzito | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattzito | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw, this at least partially not google’s fault. Just about everybody uses one of a few companies for restaurant menu data, and the biggest one is far and away SinglePlatform. SinglePlatform is still powered largely by scanning menus and having contractors enter them by hand, which is where many of these errors happen.

More forward-looking restaurants manage this all themselves as part of their digital strategy, but it’s still a small percentage and disproportionately located in the US.

I’m not saying Google doesn’t also scrape or use other sources, I’m sure they do, but this is one of those situations where the whole system is broken. Tbh one of the bank shot benefits of having all of these digital delivery services is that some restaurants are using aggregators that can also publish menu data.

As far as the authors idea about markup for menus, that’s great, but highly improbable for a bunch of reasons: most restaurants don’t update their menu frequently, dishes are often difficult to represent structurally, POS systems are often modeled differently than the printed menus, etc.

The most notable restaurant near me, (Garden Restaurant) can't even spell its own name correctly on its expensive professionally produced menus in the restaurant, your chance of scraping good enough menu data from their web site is negligible.

I actually went to the web site just to see, and it's worse than I thought. Even their Western menu, the stuff random Westerners think is "Chinese food" is presented as JPEGs of photographs (sometimes out of focus) of the physical menu, which is itself strewn with typographical errors and mysterious annotations.

So, to get even the bad text an actual patron has in the physical restaurant you need to scrape the site, download the images, and successfully OCR from low resolution out-of-focus photographs. It's not impossible but good luck to you, and at the end the results will still be pretty unsatisfactory. "Frind pok" is actually what they wrote, they meant Fried Pork, but that's not an OCR error it's really what they paid to have printed.

Since its near you, have you tried going there and explaining it to the manager?

Does the manager not know their menu is misspelled?

Perfect spelling and/or beautiful layout on a Chinese restaurant menu is a bit of a red flag for me.

Why? I can understand cutting Chinese restaurants some slack because of a possible language barrier with owners, but what's wrong with ones who are fluent in English? Or have the resources to hire a good agency to put together their menu and proofread it?

Not GP but I have the same red flag system. If it's perfect english (or whatever native language you use) it's more likely that not the restaurant is run by a native, not a real chinese family. So warning flags, most likely not the best the chinese kitchen can deliver :-)

Sibling post by Moru has it mostly right

Additionally, I have it in my head that not bothering to fix menus shows a certain admirable pragmatism. "Frind pok" is not correct but it is correct enough.

It's a way to find family-owned restaurants. The other ones are "good Asian restaurants have bad service" (though I don't think that's true anymore) and "good restaurants will never be expensive".

The last one is a problem because real family restaurants do want to raise prices/be more upscale too, but none of their customers will let them because they expect banh mi to be $3.

If my family is any indication, the menu won’t get corrected until the restaurant owner sends their child to American schools and the kid gets old enough to fix it. Just give it 11 or 12 years.

My friend Chris spends a lot more time in their restaurant and is at least as pedantic about this sort of thing as I am, also he knows the people who own it fairly well, so I'm confident he's mentioned it.

However while the restaurant's manager might care, as I understand it her husband is the hard core chef who ensured it's a success, why should he give a shit? Presumably the errors are just in the text for stupid barbarians like me - many of them don't even order from his real menu anyway. His taste is what matters, nobody comes to the restaurant because of the typography or web site design, they come to eat his food.

This is 100% Google's responsability. If you claim to have a feature but it is broken it's your fault, you should just not claim that you can actually do this. The restaurant guys provide exactly what they want: a pdf menu, if google can't parse it correctly it should show the raw information instead of trying to do something fancy

Except that Google isn't doing the parsing, it's a third-party, who is then providing the data to Google (and a bunch of others). Sadly, mixed in with the parsed/PDF-scanned data is accurate data that was hand-edited or auto-uploaded from a restaurant POS or kitchen management system.

So, Google and these other companies, the option is - build it yourself and try to do better, or buy data from the companies that do this at varying degrees of quality, or don't have menu data at all. Except the last option, people _want_ menu data, it's one of the most common things people want to know about a restaurant.

I think it's a strike against our industru thay we failed to define a way to publish standard platform independant menu and price list file that any apply application could parse and represent

Instead eveyone is busy building their own little feudal kingdom and they call it platform even if it's actually just a toll booth

maybe menus and price lists have edge cases?

The issue isn’t one of format, it’s distribution. Menu data is usually in hard copy form, and the utility to a restaurant in going to the trouble to duplicate it online and keep it up to date is almost certainly not worth it (in their eyes).

So I’m sure you could sign up yelp and google and Uber eats and everyone else for a common data standard, but you’d then still have to go chasing the restaurants to go put that information in a system somewhere.

We haven’t even really been able to convince businesses to put their opening hours online, it’s still such a problem that one of my interview questions at google in 2018 was “name as many ways as possible you might be able to discover a business’s opening hours online”

Menus are about an order of magnitude more complex than that - it’s a tough thing to get restaurants to do.

My local pharmacy has a website, their hours are avaliable on that website, and the automatic answering machine tells you their hours when you call them

Yet their hours are wrong, and different, on google and bing.

if I own a business there is no singular place I know of where I can publish my opening hours. My laundrette here can't publish the fact that they will be closed due to sickness except by placing a sheet of A4 at the door.

There is a standard: https://schema.org/Menu

"A structured representation of food or drink items available from a FoodEstablishment."

Clearly the issue is that no one has convinced FoodEstablishments of the business case to spend tech dollars publishing their menus.

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