Narrow by review count

Josh Eddy writes:

I love your Menumap mashup, and I use it every week to find lunch around Union Square. The one thing that bothers me about all social review sites is how companies will post positive reviews of their own service, boosting their score. That's why when there's an an average rating with lots of reviews, I give it a lot more trust. Do you think it would be possible to somehow include that information on Menumap (or even filter by it)?

Well we aim to please Josh. Check it out:



Notice the new "At least X reviews" selection on the right, and the review count next to the star rating.

Thanks for the suggestion!

To Yelp or not to Yelp

For all those who want more restaurants or cities listed, I'm trying to figure out places from which to get more data. I'm not really sure what the best answer is, and I've got a post on the other blog trying to figure out what to do. I would love to hear some suggestions. (Comments are on over there.)

IE Fixes should be good

OK, I've sold my soul to the devil, installed XP and did some especially gross JavaScript work arounds for IE. I've tested it in IE 6 and I'm hoping that means that we're good with 7. Really... so gross.

Share and enjoy.

Thanks Noah

Noah has been helping me sort through some of the IE issues for menumaps. I don't have access to Windows, and thus Internet Explorer, so testing a challenge.

With his help I've managed to get I think the main features working. The two outstanding things that I know about are the rollover on the right isn't working, and that the neighborhood menus are showing up behind the map. I'm working on if, but if anyone knows the answer please feel free to drop me a line.

12 months and 4,000 more restaurants later

Well, its time to dust off the old menumap code and give it an update and a whole new blog. I've cleaned up the way that I do the scraping and address lookup, so most of the changes happened behind the scenes. Hopefully you'll notice that the data quality has improved. The "link to this" url works fully now, preserving the highlighted selections. Filtering on cuisine should work correctly on all cities.

Also, since I've been blogging more about not menumap stuff, I created this blog to keep updates. Blogspot really is much easier than the custom wordpress install I have.

Here are the current stats:

City	Old Count	New Count	Websites	OpenTable
New York	5,535	6,264	3,129	494
Boston	1,261	1,335	831	143
San Francisco	2,199	2,191	1,240	289
Chicago	2,846	2,955	1,555	181
Los Angeles	1,478	3,628	2,055	237
Philadelphia	1,081	2,145	1,051	109
Washington DC	804	1,959	1,379	222
Totals		20,477	11,240	1,675

Please drop me a line if you have any suggestions or comments.