Our previous post discussed a recent poll indicating most consumers research a restaurant online prior to visiting it. Looking at the various restaurant details available online, we chose to examine and present the online coverage of 3 very different attributes: user reviews, parking and wine details. Our assumptions are that most users are interested in peer reviews, many are also interested in parking information and only a small percentage of users are interested in wine details.

Imagine our surprise to find that user reviews are available for only 16% of LA’s food & dining businesses.

Previous statistics suggest the Boston food and dining industry has wide online presence. This is also reflected here, where we see that the highest percentage of user reviews available for restaurants – 36% – is again in Boston.

As for parking information, various websites indicate whether street, valet or lot parking is available for a restaurant. This information is least available for the NYC area – parking information is provided for only 9% of restaurants.
However, restaurant wine details availability online is the highest for NYC restaurants – users can see wine lists and prices for 19% of restaurants in New York.

Palore extracted these statistics while gathering business data from 20 leading local and nationwide search sites, covering over 100,000 restaurants in major US cities. Custom content projects on any vertical are available – contact us here for more information.

Many local search sites boast wide and deep data in their business listings. We decided to take a closer look by analyzing the Food & Dining category in New York City on 20 leading local sites.

We focused on two parameters:

1. The number of listings (e.g. restaurants, coffee shops, bars etc.) available in each site.

2. The total number of business details available for the above listings. These include attributes such as description, cuisine, video, reviews, opening hours and wine details. We excluded the names, phone numbers and addresses from the count, and when encountering more than one review per business we counted it as just one attribute.

We found great variance between the sites both in the number of listings that they have and in the richness of the data available per listing. For example, New York Magazine has a relatively low number of restaurants but the highest number of rich details per restaurant (8). In the overall analysis, CitySearch comes out as the local site with the most comprehensive data.

The above data is based in part on Palore’s data extraction system which collects, normalizes and merges local business data from millions of Web pages.

Please share your thoughts and let us know what other data comparisons you think would be interesting – in other verticals (e.g. auto dealerships or realtors), on a geographic basis (e.g. data analysis per city overlaid on a US map) or in any other format.

To acquire rich local business data in any vertical, please contact Palore’s sales team.