Restaurant Reviews: It’s a West Coast Thing
By Matt McGee on Jun 25, 2008 in Local Search, Statistics
I remember someone saying that local search is like the wild west, and Palore has some data that shows at least one aspect of local fits the description. Check out this chart showing the amount of restaurants that have been reviewed online across the U.S.
Palore says the data comes from crawling 70 local and vertical sites. The map above shows how many restaurants have at least one review posted on one local/vertical site. The top three states are Massachusetts, Washington, and California, with more than 23% of restaurants in each state having at least one review online.
I think it’s pretty interesting that the far west is home to the most restaurant reviews … and I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the heavy West Coast adoption of Yelp?
Update
The folks at Palore tell me this data does NOT include Yelp reviews, so we can put that theory to rest. 
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5 Comment(s)
By Brick Marketing on Jun 25, 2008 | Reply
Interesting data! We are surprised to see that our state - Massachusetts has significantly higher reviews than surrounding states — even New York?
By Tim Flint on Jun 25, 2008 | Reply
This map will be interesting to see in 5 years and how things would have changed. In fact, I think it will be interesting to see next year.
This map really shows that trends start from the coasts.
By Informitus Media on Jun 25, 2008 | Reply
That is really interesting, Palore is providing great data for local search. As you suggest I think that west coast adoption of Yelp may be a significant contributor to the provided data.
By Matt McGee on Jun 26, 2008 | Reply
It’s not Yelp data. I just updated the post. The Palore folks say Yelp reviews aren’t included in this data set….
By David on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
I find this article very interesting. My wife and I just decided to start a blog to review resturants in the area where we live. The area we live in is quite a bit behind the Internet curve and the few resturaunts that have websites can’t even seem to keep their menu’s up-to-date. People love to eat and I’m sure this is a trend that is not going away.