Why a 5.0 does not win

A 5.0 from nine people outranks a 4.6 from four thousand on every naive sort, and it is wrong every single time. We shrink every rating toward a prior before ranking, so confidence has to be earned by volume. That one decision changes the first page of results more than anything else we do.

What shrinkage does

Every rating is pulled toward a 4.0 prior, weighted as though the venue already had sixty reviews at that number. A place needs roughly sixty of its own before its average starts to dominate, which is about where a Google rating stops being an accident. A 5.0 from nine people lands near 4.1. A 4.6 from four thousand barely moves. The second one wins, which is the correct answer.

Below 3.0 nothing is worth showing, and above 4.8 the differences are noise, so the scale is clipped at both ends rather than pretending to resolve a gap that is not there.

Why one vibe runs several searches

“Drinks” is not one query. It fans out into a cocktail search, a brewery search, a wine bar search, a rooftop search and more, each weighted, then merged. A single query returns one flavor of answer and calls it the category. The card tells you which search surfaced each place, so you can see why it is there.

Why the top ten are not the top ten

The highest-scoring ten results for “Drinks” are ten cocktail bars, because a scorer has no concept of boredom. The last pass deliberately gives up some score to return a set containing different kinds of night. You are choosing, not being ranked at.

What we refuse to rank on

Air quality is read once per search, at the center of your search area, never per venue. Scoring individual venues on nearby air would systematically down-rank whichever neighborhood sits closest to industry. In Detroit that is 48217 and Southwest — a Black and Latino community carrying pollution its residents did not create. Citywide conditions beside the weather are actionable and identify nobody. A pollution gradient across a result list is a different product, and not one we are willing to ship.