Starting with a small background, we have so far used a survey approach to rate restaurants for you – that is how you have seen each and every restaurant being rated on Zomato. Since we touch each restaurant physically, to collect menus and information, this used to be easy for us. We used to talk to a few customers sitting in a restaurant or coming out of a restaurant to fill a brief form for us such as this:

Now, since we have around 18,000 listings, this is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Moreover, restaurants change, they change their menus, people, management, and what not. And any of these changes could have a significant impact on a customer’s experience at these restaurants. For us, with this scale, it has been extremely difficult to keep our ratings updated. We try to do it once every 3 months, but that is a huge task.

So, we thought that we should ask for your help. While we will continue to follow a survey approach to ratings, we will ask for your help to keep these updated. With a very simple widget that will let you tell us how you would rate a restaurant. The average rating for a restaurant would be updated in front of your own eyes in real time. Every such move has its pros and cons. The biggest pro is that our ratings will have more ‘votes’ into them, so will be more authentic. In combination with reviews, it will give you the power of making a restaurant notice and pay attention to your feedback.

Cons – spam. For the first few weeks, we will have to be on our toes to prevent restaurant owners from rating their own restaurants well and bashing up their deserving competitors. Trust us when we say that even some of the best restaurants in town do such things. But hopefully, by now, we know such miscreants very well and should be able to spot them with just one eye open.

If you notice the survey form above, people very rarely fill or care about detailed ratings (food/service/ambience). All they are concerned about is the ‘Overall Experience’. And the overall rating of a restaurant very aptly sums it up. So in the name of making it simple, we are also doing away with detailed ratings. From now onwards, there is going to be just one global average (survey users). This is one change we are scared about the most, but also the one thing we think that makes the most amount of sense.

Also, this is just Step 1 of giving our users more power to control the content on Zomato. In line with our API launch, it opens up the platform to so many more possibilities. For all the developers using our API, this feature will also be rolled out on the API in a few days time (you should get an email when we do that).