I created a service a couple years back as a yelp alternative called www.hotspotrobot.com, that basically aggregates "best of" lists from zagat, michelin, local papers, etc. The coverage is best in NYC, but it also works in SF. Hopefully it's helpful!
Thanks Travis. I actually just tried signing up for ad sense, and they rejected my app due to lack of content. Basically, the app provides a lot of charts and graphs based on user data, but doesn't have much in the way of text, and it appears Google Ad Sense won't work effectively in that case. I'll take a look at google DPF and see if I can use other ad networks as per your suggestion. Thanks for the tip!
Le Bernardin is pretty good, but probably not worth the four hour trek! :)
Good point about collecting emails for people searching in areas that aren't covered yet, and alerting them when we expand to those areas. Thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks. The area you search for (in this case, midtown, NYC) helps determine the visible map area, and then the returned results are the top ranked places within that visible map. If you don't want any brooklyn results, you can zoom in or pan on the map to only have the particular area of interest visible in the map. If you ensure you can't see brooklyn in the map, then Peter Luger should no longer show up in your results (but let me know if that's not the case for you).
As for including reviews in their entirety, I completely agree that would be valuable. However, we don't want to copy reviews completely (as that's likely copyright infringement). Instead, we try to make it (relatively) easy to jump quickly from Hotspot Robot to the original content creators if you want more details on reviews (or if you want menus from menupages, reservations from open table etc).
Thanks for the great feedback. Some thoughts/responses:
* Robot eating pizza logo - Great suggestion! Definitely need a good logo, and will consider this when reaching out to a graphic designer / 99 designs.
* WAY too many different fonts and text styles - Guilty as charged. Will fix this in future updates.
* Get some better/more appetising food photos - Believe it or not, these are actually improvements over past iterations. But I will keep my eyes open for something even more delicious (although if you have food images suggestions, I'm all ears..er...eyes..er, stomach?)
* The text boxes change size when selected, causing the layout to jump. - Noted. Will add to list of things to address.
* Edit and cancel button icons jump 1px on hover. - Should be fixed now
* The cancel button has a text-selection cursor instead of a pointer - Should be fixed now
* The flat grey header doesn't really go with the wood panel effect. - Noted
* Wood panel bg repeats too soon with a visible join. - Fixed the visible join
* I'd consider making the phone numbers always visible, rather than with the address expander. - Interesting point. I've also had requests to make the entire address visible too. I go back and forth between making more info visible immediately versus keeping the results cleans and simple and providing more info on a need-to-know basis. Sounds like you think phone # is more vital to expose earlier.
* The dollar signs to indicate price are a kinda ambiguous. How must is a $$$ meal compared to a $$$$ meal? - Yes I can make this clearer. The system is the same as Yelp's for restaurants, but I should add a legend calling this out more or somehow make this more obvious.
Thanks again for all the great feedback. Super helpful.
I live in NYC and would be interested in the space, if it's still available. I just pitched my project (www.hotspotrobot.com) on HN actually: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2275591 . As I mention in that post, Hotspot Robot is a new way to discover the best restaurants/bars in your city. Here's a 60 second video explaining what makes Hotspot Robot different: http://www.vimeo.com/18023901