As the biggest ride-hailing company in the world, Uber collects huge amounts of data from each trip their drivers make. Instead of letting it collect dust in a server room, Uber has decided to use all that trip data to figure out what are best restaurants are in a city based on how many Uber clients have requested from or to a locale.
The data the company collects from its drivers around the world is mostly used to improve its core services. However, this doesn’t stop the company to use for other endeavors. As such, it has recently announced the Uber Restaurant Guide.
The guide only covers restaurants only in twelve cities around the United States such as Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, LA, Miami, NYC, Phoenix, Miami, Nashville, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Only riders in those select cities will be able to browse the various recommendations of locales.
Uber’s restaurant guide uses the trip data in those cities to select establishments and dividing them into six different categories. When you’re on the lookout for a new place to eat, you can browse recommendations based on what’s popular, local favorites, brunch restaurants, up-and-coming locales, date-night destinations as well as weekend picks.
The ranking of the restaurants in each category is determined by the amounts of pick-ups or drop-offs drivers receive at their location at specific times of the day, as well as taking into consideration what type of customers go there, and other factors.
If you plan on trying out the Uber guide, it’s important to remember that their rankings are purely data-driven, unlike Yelp rankings based on the feedback about the quality of the restaurant. The only direct correlation between the number of drop-offs and a restaurant is that the place might be popular and crowded. Only because of its popularity you think that the place has quality service and good food otherwise, people wouldn’t go there at all.
At the moment, the Uber Restaurant Guide is only available on the web. However, it’s very likely that the company will either develop a standalone app for the rankings or just integrate as side-feature into the core Uber app, where it can be easily accessed by all users in the corresponding cities.
Image source: Flickr