Founder of Salamanca here, an app that aggregates every major restaurant booking platform into one app (OpenTable, SevenRooms, Tock, Resy, The Fork and others..)
Firstly, nice site - always love new tools to discover restaurants, thanks for posting, I’ve shared your blog post with friends, it was a brilliant read.
I have some recent experience working with restaurant reviews, I found that using only Google reviews can be unreliable, as some places that have top reviews may not be generally accepted as the ‘best’ restaurants.
We currently use a combination of Google reviews + Trip Advisor + Reviews from the booking platforms and we have web crawlers to check if the restaurant is featured on reputable restaurant guides or review sites.
We aggregate all of this review data and compute a “score”, so when users search for available tables in a city we can show available tables at the highest scoring restaurants first.
We apply Wilson score confidence intervals, to trust restaurant scores that have more reviews.
We are also applying an exponential decay when users list nearby restaurants, as you might be willing to travel a little further to go to a higher scoring restaurant.
Working with review data is fascinating.. we’re going to be launching an AI summary of recent reviews and our computed score in the coming weeks to help our users understand our ratings.
Our app went live on the App Store only a few days ago and we expect it to be live on Google play later this week.. so it’s an extremely busy time!
If you’re interested in what we’re doing please reach out, it would be great to connect, I really enjoyed your article!
Firstly, nice site - always love new tools to discover restaurants, thanks for posting, I’ve shared your blog post with friends, it was a brilliant read.
I have some recent experience working with restaurant reviews, I found that using only Google reviews can be unreliable, as some places that have top reviews may not be generally accepted as the ‘best’ restaurants.
We currently use a combination of Google reviews + Trip Advisor + Reviews from the booking platforms and we have web crawlers to check if the restaurant is featured on reputable restaurant guides or review sites.
We aggregate all of this review data and compute a “score”, so when users search for available tables in a city we can show available tables at the highest scoring restaurants first.
We apply Wilson score confidence intervals, to trust restaurant scores that have more reviews.
We are also applying an exponential decay when users list nearby restaurants, as you might be willing to travel a little further to go to a higher scoring restaurant.
Working with review data is fascinating.. we’re going to be launching an AI summary of recent reviews and our computed score in the coming weeks to help our users understand our ratings.
Our app went live on the App Store only a few days ago and we expect it to be live on Google play later this week.. so it’s an extremely busy time!
If you’re interested in what we’re doing please reach out, it would be great to connect, I really enjoyed your article!