Q: How can you verify the quality of a < mover / restaurant / hairdresser / babysitter / dentist / chiropractor / handyman / etc.>?
A: Ask your < friend / relative / neighbor / workmate / schoolmate / etc.>.
2009
Q: Same question.
A: Don't need no stinkin' people. We have the internets!
2012
Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it?
A: Use the 1995 solution.
We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops, hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have our hip moments). So in a way, we're the anti-UGC. When you have crowds of people, all the ratings become a noisey 3-4 stars. Including Burger King. That's why I think Fodor's content is a good alternative. We're in the travel space, not local, but, it's a refreshing alternative.
Oh, and all our apps are FREE.
The other problem is that not everyone is the same. For example I absolutely hate "attentive" staff in a restaurant (let me eat in peace and if I want something I'll ask for it), but want the check as quickly as possible on finishing while others like to slowly wind down. A regular reviewer probably won't mention either of these because that is normal to them.
The existence of multiple reviewers means one will be more like me and would mention these issues which would make me go somewhere else while others who enjoy that kind of experience would be more likely to come. This doesn't make anyone right or wrong, but does show how different reviewers help and why the lowest review scores have the most informative reviews.
Reviewers may prefer attentive staff, but the good reviewers (which exist) know that not everyone shares their preferences. That's the difference between a good review and a bad review: you can translate a good review into your own viewpoint and decide for yourself.
When I think of noisy one star reviews, I mostly think of the one star review for a microprocessor where the guy didn't use a heatsink and the motherboard melted. There are plenty of folk who come across well in writing but are monstrous in person, I'd never expect to trust their restaurant reviews, and I might not be able to identify them either.
I love reading Ebert's movie reviews. I often disagree with him, but he is a mostly fixed point. I can tell if I'm going to like something because, over time, I have developed an understanding of where his tastes and mine align and where they differ. This kind of thing is a lot harder to do online—it requires real work and attention.
In a way, we're disagreeing about where we want to have our statistical anomalies. Do we want the reliable reviewer caught on a bad day, or perhaps recognized by the staff? Or do we want the sea of one-time reviewers, a few of whom had a statistically unlikely bad or amazing experience?
Man, I'm 30 and this makes me feel old. :) In the print travel guides market, it's one of the big names. It comes from the generation before the more backpacker-oriented guides (Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, etc.) and targets more of an upper-middle-class family vacation type of audience, but it's still fairly popular, within the print-travel-guides space.
It does seem that their move into digital guides is quite recent and incomplete, though.
Not for Nokia, they aren't. (AUD 6.60 each)
But not in the "back to square one" meaning, it is rather "next level of a spiral staircase". I believe there's still room for improvement (definitely there is over the '95 low tech and probably over what we have now) in the way we can combine internet and the '95 solution to find good <mover / restaurant / hairdresser ... etc>
Time will tell - lots of money goes into social, someone will do it right or at least we'll know what obstacles prevent this from happening.
If a friend recommends Avengers Assemble, I go see it. If I end up at the cinema out of boredem, I'll let imdb help me.
I want some website to come along which solves this for me, and neither Facebook nor Hunch nor IMDB do really.
If in this case the problem were likely to be solved by acquaintances, it would also be likely to be solved by Yelp, under its assumption that people need to leave multiple reviews to be considered credible.
Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it? A: Use the 1995 solution but because it's not 1995 anymore you'll use Facebook and Twitter to ask your friends which is still using "the Internet".
But that kind of blows up your point/argument.