

Restaurant matching engine - npixie

Has anyone heard of a Pandora-like recommendation engine for restaurants?  The premise is that you enter the name of a restaurant as a proxy for the "experience" you are seeking.  The restaurant could be in any city, neighbourhood, etc.  The recommendation engine then gives you the closest "match" within a set of parameters that you define (e.g. price, city, neighbourhood).  The matching is based on the overall experience of eating at a particular restaurant vs. something more specific, such as the food itself.<p>I'm currently working on this as a side project and would love feedback.
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DanielStraight
To give you some thoughts:

I've never really heard of anything like this.

I think the trickiest part is going to be defining the "experience" of a
restaurant, not the least of which because different people experience
different restaurants differently. Pandora has an advantage in that the number
of other people listening to a song has little bearing on the sound of the
song, but the number of other people eating at restaurant (as well as their
loudness, fashion, etc) can have a significant impact on the experience of a
restaurant.

I have actually kind of wished for something like this before though. I was
trying to search by the absence of a particular feature on Urbanspoon (namely
family friendliness; it seems every restaurant in the town I was looking in is
entirely filled with youth soccer teams) and found I could not do it.

This also leads to my next question. Urbanspoon doesn't have an API. Yelp is
no match for Urbanspoon. Where are you getting your data, if you wouldn't mind
divulging?

I'd love to know how things are progressing. Do you have a blog or something
going where I can follow your progress?

