That's an interesting idea. Is the main motivation of your suggestion to find a way to enable you to better discover things you might like without relying purely on reviews and ratings? In general, I agree that ratings and reviews have inherent biases that are hard to smooth out. There are so many more dimensions to it, such as how much weight you apply to a review written by someone that is trying a certain type of food for the first time.

Do you think that you would see better results if Yelp was able to use a collaborative filtering approach to somehow personalize their results such that they more closely match your tastes and preferences - based on other users' data?