Restaurant Recommendations vs Restaurant Reviews

Why the fuss over recommendations? What's wrong with reviews?

There's nothing wrong with reviews, in fact we love reviews because they provide certain kinds of information about a restaurant that our collaborative filtering algorithm can't, well, can't do yet. Many review sites have hundreds or even thousands of reviews for popular restaurants; are you going to read all of those? Then how many pages and pages of reviews are you going to want to read to compare several different restaurants? Practically speaking, this is not something a hungry diner has time to do.

You could sort by the average rating. Now we're getting somewhere. However, given enough users and enough time, everything starts to become about 3.8 (literally... 3.8 of 5 stars is where they all end up). So if everything is 3.8, now what's good?

You could ask your friends, but you wouldn't ask all your friends, right? Some of your friends probably don't share your tastes in food, so their opinions on restaurants are less valuable to you.

So what if you didn't require the people to actually be your friends? What if you asked a pool of people who were the most similar to you what they'd like, and weighted the averages by how much alike they are?

That's what Foodio54 does :) So, Sign up now, tell us about 10 restaurants, and get great restaurant recommendations.