In order to provide you with the best personalized suggestions for restaurants hotels and other services we need to learn about your tastes.   We learn about your tastes by examining the ratings you give places you’ve been.  In order to make rating places easier for you we are going through a number of site changes.  Our first is a new rate places interface that allows you to quickly type in the name of a place you want to rate and rate it with just a few clicks and keystrokes.

We’ve still kept our old interface where we suggest some places for you to rate based on their popularity.  Using these two tools you should be able to rate a number of places and begin getting personalized suggestions in no time.

Click here to try out the new rate places and begin getting personalized suggestions.

We’ve made a decision at theSUGGESTR.com to focus primarily on providing suggestions for restaurant and travel related services.  This includes restaurants, hotels, bars and clubs.  Previously our site held ratings for a number of other types of services (banks, grocery stores, shopping, etc).  However, due to the nature of our unique and powerful suggestion engine it is important to have a more focused set of ratings.  By narrowing our focus we will (and already are) provide you with better suggestions which is our primary goal.

So rate some more places and get some new and improved suggestions!

As new users come across our site, theSUGGESTR.com, they often assume the site is like other local search sites such as Yelp or CitySearch.  With our re-design we hope the site better articulates the difference between us and them, if not hopefully this post helps.

First off – we like Yelp and CitySearch, we use them to.  However, our site is about discovering new places you may never have heard of, especially unique places that may not be reviewed enough to get to the top of the list on the bigger sites.  theSUGGESTR uses a technique known as collaborative filtering to predict how well you will like a place based on your tastes and the tastes of other users.  By using this technique we eliminate some of the bias that goes into individual reviews and strictly allow the ratings to find you a place to try.  So why is this so cool…

Imagine you find yourself in a new city for the first time.  If you were to open up Yelp you’d find 100’s of top places with potentially 100’s of reviews each.  You’re then forced to narrow your search down, lets say you choose Italian and a specific neighborhood – then you may be on your way to finding someplace.  However, with theSUGGESTR.com’s personalized suggestions we can predict how well you’ll like that place and make suggestions for places that are nearby that you’ll like even better.  The difference is that we tell you places we think you’ll love rather than forcing you to search for places and decide for yourself.  Using our alerts functionality we can actually email you when your near one of our top suggestions!

We think using sites like Yelp and CitySearch to verify our predictions is a great idea!

Stay tuned to our blog for more information on how you can get the best possible personalized suggestions.