Which sites should I use when searching for nearby restaurants while traveling? [closed]

Ultimately reviews are the opinion of the minority. The number of people who ate at a restaurant, slept in a hotel, shopped at a store and then reviewed that place is but a small percentage of that business's customers. And when you factor that with differences in expectations, the value of reviews decreases even further.

Personally I put more faith in reviews of restaurants by locals, over reviews by tourists. Locals tend to have tried a number of local restaurants and base their reviews on local standards. Tourists tend to have been there once and tried just a couple of spots and thus compare it to reviews they read and their hometown dining expectations.

The services you mention provide mostly real reviews, but fake ones can make their way into most any review platform. And you have figure there are "paid" reviewers out there, who do eat, sleep, shop at the businesses, but get compensated for writing a better review. If you want to be certain, as you narrow down your choices, start looking at those places reviews on different platforms to make your choice. But always good to head out for dinner with a couple of choices in mind, then give them a once over before sitting down.

There are two factors here. One is finding restaurants near you and the other is figuring out which one is good.

Personally I rely mostly on Google Maps. Given your location (to find restaurants near where you are already) or search location (to find restaurants near where you will be), it will display most restaurants in the area. You can move the map and it will update quickly with restaurants within the display area.

Once you select a restaurant, it will give you a review score and the number of reviews it is based on. You can also filter my minimum rating which I almost always set to 4 stars, discounting any restaurant that does not score that high.

Among the restaurants which remain in the search results, I read a few of the reviews for several that have at least 50+ reviews. Fewer reviews can easily get skewed. Even so, reading is important since people's opinions on food and restaurants are greatly opinionated! One bad review can easily skew a score. Just too days ago, I went to a 4.1 restaurant which had good reviews and one bad one which said, the food was too spicy. Well, the food was delicious and barely spicy! People's palates differ and from experience I have found that a lot of people cannot recognize good cooking!

By only looking at 4-star scores and above, what you are doing is mostly avoiding bad food, not going to necessarily find great cuisine by many of them are. My two main criticism of Google Maps is that there is way to filter on price-range and there is no way to know what type of establishment it is. One highly rated place may be a great take out spot while another can be fancy high-end restaurant, yet you can't tell without digging deeper into results.

Previously I tried TripAdvisor and Yelp. The former I found that reviews where of very poor quality and completely unreliable. Yelp seems to have gotten important to the point that everyone who is family or friend of a restaurant owner goes there to boost results, while competitors send their friends to put in bad reviews. You can often tell by the fact reviews are polarized, lots of good an bad but not many in the middle. A reliable set of reviews should look like a normal curve with few exceptions.