This site pulls data from Reddit based on the entered search terms and extracts mentioned restaurants, sentiment to compute a popularity score based on comment age and upvotes. See How It Works for more information.

Usage

On average, computed popularity scores are generally ~88% accurate, and ~ 70-90% of restaurants mentioned in a post are captured.

Restaurant data (full name, address, business status) is populated for the top results independently from a third-party API, after ranking data has been collected.

Generally, popularity scores should be interpreted relative to other results in the same query. Depending on the popularity of a type of food and location, different amounts of total data may be collected, meaning a lower score could simply be the result of less abundance of data. Typically, a restaurant with <10 points has insufficient data to properly rank: below that threshold, a mention could just be based on random probability instead of a meaningful aggregation of opinions.

Because restaurants may be expressed in a variety of ways (abbreviations, in-part, or in-whole) restaurant names are normalized and similiar ones are grouped together. This process is not perfect, and the individual restaurants that were grouped are displayed under each listing ("AKA:"). For restaurants with generic words in their name (eg, "Ramen") this may result in several unrelated restaurants being grouped together. When this is the case, the listing should be ignored; however, if there are only one or two stray restaurants, the listing is generally still accurate.

Extracting and processing hundreds of comments/query is a heavy task that runs on GPUs in a cloud. As a result, listings may take a while to initially show up - this is normal.

Intention

Towards the end of December 2021, I was looking for good restaurant recommendations in Los Angeles. Sure, you have TripAdvisor, Yelp, and dozens of other Top-X lists, but for the most part, those are rarely accurate and the difference between 4.7 stars and 4.5 stars is negligible.

I stumbled upon r/FoodLosAngeles and their recommendations were 4-for-4 during my brief stay. I'm not a food critic, but I fathom most people aren't either and just want some yummy food.

So, I embarked on a project that ultimately led to this site: to mine restaurant recommendations from Reddit. I hope this site is helpful to you, as it certainly has been for me.

Built by Welton Wang © 2022