You can see an example of our new business pages here.

We’ve also got some screenshots of our some of the new content we have thanks to the CityGrid API.

At the heart of this issue is the business model most sites use – customers generate reviews and businesses generate revenue.  So what is different about theSUGGESTR.com you may ask?  First off, as an unfunded site, we have no real need to make millions of dollars of revenue, so basic advertising will suffice (when the time comes).  Also the use of our prediction engine rather than verbose reviews reduces some of the bias sites like Yelp generally introduce.  Since a single rating or review won’t have any real impact on our suggestions without the other user establishing a similarity profile with you (yes you individually).  Given that, businesses are less likely to be concerned with changing individual reviews (nor would we ever let them).

theSUGGESTR.com is by no means the perfect way to find a new restaurant but it is fundamentally different to how most other search sites do things and given the angst over Yelp’s approach we’d love for you to give it a try!

Thanks.

RPXNow provides the ability to login using a number of providers including but not limited to Google, Twitter and Facebook.  Integration is relatively easy and very well documented.  RPXNow has different levels of membership from free to paid all with some different functionality.  I suggest you give it a look to see if it works for your site.

If you want to see RPXNow in action go to theSUGGESTR.com and give it a try.

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.

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

In our journey to provide the best personalized suggestions for local restaurants and businesses we are pleased to announce the creation of our Blog Affiliate Program.  This program is designed to allow “Foodie”, Restaurant or local business review blogs take advantage of our similarity and suggestion engine to find new user’s who have similar interests and tastes, thus driving new and quality traffic.  For us (and our users) these new ratings will help drive better suggestions.

For bloggers, the best part about this program is that it requires basically ZERO work.  Just write your review blog and we’ll review it and create ratings on our site which will then be used to find user’s with similar tastes and help drive new suggestions.

You can learn more about this program and how to register by clicking here.

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.

GeoRSS feeds can also be mapped out with Google Maps as well.

See the GeoRSS feed on Google Maps.

Enjoy!

Our automated bot, @thesuggestr_bot also utilizes the location API, so if your building a location aware application the bot’s feed may be useful to check out.

Enjoy!