First-World Problems: New in town? Good luck! [Joe Mannix]

I moved to a new place last year. New house, new town, new state, new time zone. One of the challenges with making a move like that is finding stuff. Not finding your away around - that's what GPS and paying attention are for - but finding out what's around and if it's any good. Where are the restaurants and is there a good Mexican place? Who are the car mechanics in town and are they honest?

The solution to this problem was always touted as - and accepted as - "the internet." After living through using the internet for this for a year, I have to say that it doesn't work well - but it has displaced everything else, leaving you with no options. The two big problems with "use the internet" in my experience are locality and review quality.

I live in a small city that is technically in the metro area defined by the big city nearby. Several other small cities are in the same scenario. If I put in a search like "Chinese restaurant in JoeCity," I will get one or two results. And a dozen or so results from BigCity. And several from OtherSmallCities. A is B is C is D to the search engines - although the place in my town might be 10 minutes away and the place in BigCity might be 45 minutes. It's all just more or less equal. If it's in the metro area, it's "local" and the search engines return it. Some sites are especially bad about this. "Sponsored results" are a whole 'nother problem, as they change ordering and make locality preferences even less meaningful.

Finding stuff that's actually in my small city is way harder than I thought it would be. Review quality is essentially pure fiction as far as I can tell. I never took online reviews all that seriously, but they are way out of kilter from reality in almost all cases. Lots of reviewers are clearly shills, some are folks with an axe to grind and the rest show the wild variability of what someone thinks is "great." The places with a large review count and very low score (one star or so) are indeed usually lousy, but two stars vs. five stars appears to be a meaningless distinction.

But the traditional sources are no better. The BBB is still okay for things like car repair shops, but has always needed a grain of salt. The local Chamber of Commerce reflects only a minority of local businesses, and they don't have a comprehensive business directory. Asking a neighbor is still asking a neighbor and works as well as it ever has - if you can find a neighbor to ask who doesn't just tell you "go sink into the mire of NextDoor to find out the answer."

It makes me pine for the days of the Yellow Pages. Sure that was gate-kept but at least it was actually local and usually reflected reality.

So what do you folks do to find stuff in a new place? I find myself putting inordinate time into trying to filter the inaccurate and indifferent internet results and just asking the small number of people I know. Is there a better way to approach the problem in this new world?

posted by Open Blogger at 02:00 PM

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