A Turkey Day poll: Do you think such a free APP is useful to you?

Culture, Media, General Culture, Chains, General Discussions
21

That sounds suspiciously like a popularity contest.

22

If the app gives greater weight to recommenders who please the most people, how is that any different than Yelp?

One of the things that distinguishes sites like hungry onion from Yelp is that we talk about places that are quirky in the sense that they may only have one amazing item and otherwise be mediocre, may have terrible service but amazing food, or have a location remote to where tourists travel. To get the most out of such websites, the user needs to invest time to get the good info

If recommenders on your site wants to please the most people, and make the most money, all they would need to do is post the top yelp rankings or other big lists.And in doing so They would be the middleman charging people for already free information.

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23

Hey, hyperbowler, thanks for participating in this general discussion topic (not specific on any eatery) too!

Your incisive worry is a very good one. Actually it brings out the basic structure/framework of the proposed app: the free metro area walking distance restaurant search is the bone and the slight tipped city search for rural area is the complement. Most of people are gonna use the walking distance search as it is free and handy, so almost every good restaurant has equal opportunities to get picked by searchers. Replicating any big site’s top ranking lists won’t work for any guide/recommender.

24

Cool. Please build in a feature to automatically detect closures (using Yelp api or google perhaps). Chefsfeed for example doesn’t do this and it’s frustrating to have to verify each of their picks to see if a Restaurant is still in business

25

Good morning Hyperbowler!

It’s already partially built in! The phone number, which comes with the address after you click the “Show Address” button, is a real-time result from Google API. And I have highlighted the reminder “Please call before you go”. So, if there is no phone # shown for you to call, you know there is something wrong (a recent closure maybe). Of course, area coordinators/management should check for closures for often.

This is a temporary solution easily applicable for now. I’ll look into better hopefully permanent one, for sure. Thanks for all of your suggestions so far! All very thoughtful to customers!

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26

I’ve published Google Ads’ first week turnouts in this post. Please take a look and continue having fun voting above :smile:

27

@hyperbowler
Building in a COMPLETE feature to detect closures using Google API was harder than I thought, as when searching with address/name the closure doesn’t show in the direct result. After many tries, I finally have a permanent solution in place: For the walking distance restaurant search, it checks against Google api for closures when the “Show Me Address” button is clicked after the search result, and it shows a message for closure (no more showing the restaurant info) if a closure is detected; And for the city area search, when proceeding the checkout any closure detected is removed from the shopping cart with a message telling the user to check out again.

Any closure detected is immediately removed from the active database so it won’t show in a search result any more. This way the tedious job of checking closures from time to time by a human can be avoided for good :slight_smile: :sunny:

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