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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I’ve found it’s very city dependent. My experience in the US was yelp was miles ahead, but where I live (Edinburgh) it’s pretty much useless.

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In the southeastern US, Yelp is almost negative signal because southerners have legitimately horrible taste.

I have an unfair suspicion that the people who make yelp great in the US are the same that make it suck in Europe!

A lot of rural areas you really just gotta discount the ratings, both on Google maps and yelp.

In fairness to people, yelp and google, if there’s only two places to eat in a town there’s only two places to eat. The local people are likely friends with the people who run the places and their social hubs. Personally if my mate opened a restaurant and it was awful, I’d tell him nicely but I wouldn’t leave a bad review for it.

I think tripadvisor in the US suffers from the same problem as yelp in Europe - it’s predominantly tourists so the places visited are predominantly places tourists visit. If you want the tourist experiences they’ll keep you right but if you want “what the locals eat” you have to do what the locals do.

My experience living and travelling in Europe was that this is definitely true for TripAdvisor, but much less so for Yelp. Mostly tourist traps (that you'd find anyway) on TripAdvisor, while I found some amazing, hidden, non-touristy (think no printed menus, just staff that explains the day's dishes in the local language) restaurants on Yelp.

I concluded that Yelp is used more by locals, but maybe the people using it just align with my tastes better.

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