Online Restaurant Reviews are Less About Food, More About the Weather

There are online reviews for basically everything. People will leave a review for a door mat. It's odd, but it's the way of the online world. In fact, there are reviews about so many things that they've become useless. You could spend hours looking up thoughts on the latest restaurant if you wanted to. That's what's so odd about reviews: They're worthless because they're so subjective, but they're still everywhere. Shedding more light on the absurdness of online reviews is a new study that found pretty much everything — even the weather — influences what someone says in their review.

Saeideh Bakhshi, a student from Georgia Tech University's Institute of Technology; her husband, Partha Kanuparthy, of Yahoo Labs; and Eric Gilbert, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, used computers to analyze 1.1 million online reviews for 840,000 restaurants in over 32,000 cities across the United States. They found that the size and racial makeup of a city can influence reviews. But the biggest factor by far was weather.

The most reviews were left during July and August, but they were also more likely to be negative, because the weather is typically hot and humid during those months. Extreme weather, no matter what the restaurant was serving, was bound to mean bad reviews. The most negative reviews were posted when it was either below 40 degrees or above 100 degrees. Oh, and of course if it was raining or snowing.

"People love to describe themselves as foodies," Bakhshi explained to Georgia Tech's site. "But in the end, it looks like we're all weather people, whether we realize it or not. The best reviews are written on sunny days between 70 and 100 degrees. Science has shown that weather impacts our mood, so a nice day can lead to a nice review. A rainy day can mean a miserable one."

Other findings from the study included customers who lived in cities were more willing to accept waiting a long time for a table than those who lived in suburban or rural areas. Also, simply adding some fancy looking stuff and jacking up the prices can lead to positive reviews. Sushi restaurants overall received much better reviews than places that served hamburgers and typical diner fare. "That speaks to the perception of price," Bakhshi told The New York Times. "Places that have nice ambience and are listed as romantic or trendy or more expensive, the rating is higher."

Thanks to Bakhshi and her team, we all now know for certain that online reviews are garbage. There are simply too many factors that contribute to someone's perception of a place. It just proves that the only review that truly matters is your own.

[Image via Flickr - Macinate]