Urbanspoon is a small Seattle startup that wants to help you find the perfect restaurant. Their goal: compete head on with Yelp and other user review sites, specifically around restaurants.
But they are approaching the market in a different way than Yelp and others. Instead of talking users into coming to their site and writing reviews, they’re taking a decentralized approach and aggregating available reviews from trusted sources around the web – local newspapers, citysearch, etc. The approach is very similar to what Rotten Tomatoes has done successfully with movies.
Users can vote on each restaurant in the system and can also leave comments – effectively their own reviews. And anyone that wants a review they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere to be included can do so by adding a bit of code to the post.
So far, so good. They’re claiming 1.5 million monthly page views on 500,000 unique visitors. The company covers fourteen U.S. cities currently, with fifteen more on the way. And they’ve done all of this with a three man team and no funding. All three founders, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnell, are ex-Jobster employees.
It’s like swik.net do with all content tagged in del.icio.us.
Was wondering if there are any copyright issues involved here? Would anyone know?
Google already does this with restaurant reviews.
Nonsense. There is no added value to customers
This is by far my favorite restaurant website. My wife is a vegetarian and it can be challenging to find _good_ veggie food. I found an amazing vegetarian restaurant in Seattle using Urbanspoon.
I’m one of their monthly uniques every month.
It’s a great combination of user-generated-content and editorial content. I hate to get all “web 1.0″ about it, but data from professional restaurant reviewers are… well, professional. Adding that to UGC is a great play.
It’s also a smart business. Yelp adds a new city and it looks like a ghost town. Urban Spoon rolls out a new city, aggregates data in one place, and they’ve got a pile of rich and useful content for their users.
Well done!
they getting data from citysearch. why should I go here instead of citysearch?
There’re aleady tons of local restaurant review sites such as yelp, citysearch, metro, herfablife and others.
looks great… has a lot of potential.
yelp jumped the shark a couple of months ago.
there are tons of websites who do the same
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
if youre looking for something more local in the orlando area: http://www.KnightlyFood.com is great. Its geared toward the UCF crowd, but anyone from the area can get some good information from there
It has come up in Google searches of mine recently. It’s a good approach — kind of like Google News with a filter.
I should note that the site which executes this model the best in my opinion is Metacritic. I’d like to see Metacritic add restaurants.
This site is not that big of a deal. Its a total clone of openlist.com and from what I can tell is actually built on the openlist software just has a different flavor.
With respect to the other commenters, I think UrbanSpoon goes one better.
Dining out is such a matter of personal preference. In a restaurant town like Seattle, there’s a range of places to eat from hole-in-the-wall burger shops to fine dining.
UrbanSpoon brings the best of what’s “professional” with what matters to you. It packages it up in a hip, easy to use site that’s also available on Facebook.
I think it has some room to improve, but it’s a superior product to what it’s been compared to here.
For the vegetarian poster my sites have sections for people with special dietary needs that you can also download to your iPod. http://www.foodseattle.com
http://www.foodvancouver.com
http://toronto.foodontario.com
I love their iPhone app. It’s fun to shake for a restaurant – especially if you’re in a spontaneous mood.
If you’re looking for a place to eat in the UCF/East Orlando area I suggest checking out http://www.hungryknights.com – they have everything you could ever want to know about 200+ locations near the UCF campus, including menus, reviews, coupons, photos and a lot more, check it out! i always use it!
one valuable thing they did is aggregating newspaper reviews into the site, otherwise would be hard to find.
Try http://www.eatbite.com/ for an urbanspoon-like experience in NYC, but with pics.
if your looking to order food online, from restaurants near ucf you should check out orderknight.com They got specials with most of their restaurants and have plenty of places to chose from.
Technology has advanced a bit since this article was written in 2007, and we think that GoodFood (by Goodrec) is a better alternative to finding local restaurants.
It has a fully interactive map view like Google Maps, as well as fun and useful ways to filter content and an easy way to make your own short recs. It’s a bit like the twitter of restaurant reviews.
GoodFood is available in the iTunes store at http://goodrec....oodfood/iphone/
Goodrec launched at TechCrunch 50. You can read about our public launch here on Techcrunch: http://www.tech...-to-the-public/
We just made a demo of how this app works, check it out! http://tinyurl.com/b9t38m
I love urbanspoon. I travel a fair bit & finding a restaurant is not hard; finding a good one another story; and finding a good one near where I am or where I am going makes it that much harder.
Urbanspoon helps on both counts–good and nearby. My GPS, googlemaps, and AroundMe round out the quartet of finding good food on the road. When traveling I hate to eat at the same place twice. Urbanspoon caters to this impulse in me with its slot-machinelike interface.
Urbanspoon vs. Yelp – two years later..
http://wp.me/pAfEq-37