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Old 06-09-2023, 10:57 AM
 
2 posts, read 1,763 times
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We all know that each city has many places with reviews. I want to use that to see how popular a city is using it's population and the total added amount of reviews the places in the city has

I know that bigger cities will have more reviews, so I want to know how I can scale the reviews with the population to figure out if a city is popular or not.

I will be using the city of Plymouth WI as an example. The first 20 places that showed up when I typed "Plymouth WI Things To Do" have the combined total of 8518 reviews, while the population is 8923 people. How might I scale this to measure popularity?


I apologize if this makes no sense. I am in a rush to do something, so I had to type this out as fast as possible
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Old 06-09-2023, 12:15 PM
 
Location: Howard County, Maryland
16,556 posts, read 10,630,149 times
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Please define your terms. "Popularity" might mean how often something is visited, or it might mean how many five-star reviews it got. What exactly are you trying to measure?
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Old 06-09-2023, 12:52 PM
 
Location: Houston/Austin, TX
9,895 posts, read 6,595,852 times
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No
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Old 06-09-2023, 01:06 PM
 
Location: Green Country
2,868 posts, read 2,820,228 times
Reputation: 4798
I usually do Google Things To Do and I add a +1 for every attraction with at least 1,000 reviews. That often gives me a good barometer of popular attractions, and then I can tell how many days to spend there (usually 1 day for 5 sights. So a city with 20 sights is 4 days).

I think adding up the top 20-25 is an interesting thought experiment though. But Google doesn't show you the Top 20 most reviewed sights. They show you the top sights based on an algorithm. So a place with 50,000 reviews and 4.6 stars might be #30 whereas a place with 10,000 reviews and 4.9 stars is Top 5 in their rankings.

I would also say it biases against touristic cities that don't have a ton of people. By your metric, Houston is a more popular city than New Orleans and Houston Zoo and the Galleria are far more popular than any sight in New Orleans.

In reality, New Orleans is the far more popular tourism city. It's just that Houston has 7 million natives and they'll eventually get around to visiting the Zoo and the Mall and writing a review.
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Old 06-09-2023, 03:33 PM
 
Location: OC
12,840 posts, read 9,567,574 times
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Not sure if Google searches necessarily correlate to popularity. I'm sure when the Boston Marathon explosion happened, "Boston" was a more popular search term than New York.
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Old 06-09-2023, 03:42 PM
 
27,217 posts, read 43,923,184 times
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One needs to utilize appropriate resources for varying situations. I find for instance Google less reliable for restaurant reviews where I'll utilize TripAdvisor or Opentable which have more experienced and (in my opinion) reputable reviewers than say Yelp, which is notoriously skewed toward reviews like where "the hostess was mean to me/one star" or "our party of seventeen with no reservation for brunch had to wait over an hour/one star".
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Old 06-09-2023, 03:54 PM
 
Location: OC
12,840 posts, read 9,567,574 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyle19125 View Post
One needs to utilize appropriate resources for varying situations. I find for instance Google less reliable for restaurant reviews where I'll utilize TripAdvisor or Opentable which have more experienced and (in my opinion) reputable reviewers than say Yelp, which is notoriously skewed toward reviews like where "the hostess was mean to me/one star" or "our party of seventeen with no reservation for brunch had to wait over an hour/one star".
Good point. Many a "patron" has used Yelp as a threat to restaurant owners
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Old 06-09-2023, 04:33 PM
 
Location: Howard County, Maryland
16,556 posts, read 10,630,149 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyle19125 View Post
One needs to utilize appropriate resources for varying situations. I find for instance Google less reliable for restaurant reviews where I'll utilize TripAdvisor or Opentable which have more experienced and (in my opinion) reputable reviewers than say Yelp, which is notoriously skewed toward reviews like where "the hostess was mean to me/one star" or "our party of seventeen with no reservation for brunch had to wait over an hour/one star".
Yelpers hate everything, so you have to adjust their reviews accordingly. If you can find a restaurant with at least three stars on Yelp, go there at once; it will be the best meal you've ever had.
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Old 06-09-2023, 06:22 PM
 
Location: 'greater' Buffalo, NY
5,485 posts, read 3,926,353 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bus man View Post
Yelpers hate everything, so you have to adjust their reviews accordingly. If you can find a restaurant with at least three stars on Yelp, go there at once; it will be the best meal you've ever had.
Funny, but that's a misrepresentation. I just 'Yelped' restaurants near a random address in downtown Buffalo, and the top 20 results were all either 4 or 4.5 stars. I'm sure 'Yelpers' can be more critical in other regions, but
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Old 06-09-2023, 10:00 PM
 
Location: Buffalo, NY
3,576 posts, read 3,078,446 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Marcinkiewicz View Post
Funny, but that's a misrepresentation. I just 'Yelped' restaurants near a random address in downtown Buffalo, and the top 20 results were all either 4 or 4.5 stars. I'm sure 'Yelpers' can be more critical in other regions, but
Yelp defaults to "most recommended" so no surprise the highest are on top. If you go by "most reviewed" you start seeing more with lower ratings, but also more opinions to judge by.
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