Foursquare makes it easier to find the most popular venues in town
During last night’s #4sqchat on Twitter, I said “tips are great once you find the venues, but I want a way to find the best venues in a city to start with.” Apparently foursquare was one step ahead of me. Today they’ve rolled out a change that makes it a little easier to spot popular venues directly from the search results page. Next to each result, you’ll now find the total number of checkins and tips at that venue.
Searching for sushi, for instance, returns a list of venues with sushi in their names or tagged with “sushi.” I can glance down the list and see that Mr. Sushi has had 496 checkins, Soho has had 229, while Fusion Wok Sushi has only had 1. It’s easy to see which venues are more popular that others.
Unfortunately foursquare still doesn’t have a way to search by category, so it will only show venues with the word “sushi” in their names, or that have been tagged with “sushi.” It seems that many newer venues don’t have tags because it’s easier for users to categorize the venues as they’re being added. Hopefully foursquare will add category searching as an option soon.
The “tips” tab of the search result pages has also seen an update: you can now mark to-dos, things done and get the code for the “Add to Foursquare” button without visiting the venue page. Searching tips is a great way to find a specific dish or a place that’s kid-friendly.
A search for “pad thai” reveals tips about who has the best — and worst — pad thai in town. If you see something that sounds good, it’s easy to add to your to-do list right away. Helpfully, tips from your friends are shown first.
These new updates make finding the most popular venues in town — and adding them to your to-do list for later reference — easier. It’s clear foursquare is moving away from just a simple checkin service and using the data gathered from those checkins to help surface the best places to visit and things to do.
What do you think of these latest updates?
/Spotted via @ack154
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This is a very welcome change!
I do still wish, however, that they would allow the option to display search results by distance (which used to be the default), at least for superusers. The current algorithm makes it really tough to spot duplicate venues…particularly in this area, where Baltimore and D.C. are so close that searches tend to yield a ton of results.
Man I miss that option…
Chris – nice find! It is nice to see positive change on foursquare following #4sqChat even if the chat didn’t drive the change. It is good that many of us are all on the same page.
I love this change, but where is the option to sort by distance? I just searched for a movie theater I’ll be going to tonight… it isnt that far from me, but I’m seeing a ton of venues from Indianapolis (1hr away) instead of the one I want because they are more popular.
Give users the option to search by location or popularity.
Yeah, they’ve made some nice changes to the search results over the last few months that filter out the crappy venues and bubble the good ones to the top, but they’ve also made just finding things that are truly nearby a pain in the butt.
I agree that the changes they’ve made are more aesthetically pleasing (such as the new Edit Venue page look as well), but the inability to change the search functionality is crippling to SuperUsers. With the distance functionality it helps to find venues near you, but it also made it really obvious when there were dupes because they were listed next to each other.
With the search modified as it is, the dupes will usually have far less check-ins and won’t be anywhere near the original. I like this look for the everyday user, but for those of us with just a bit more power, it’s not a good step. I’d at least like the option to search by distance, not by popularity. And while they’re at it, I’d love the ability to see more than 50 venues at once.
location results would help these and as a fellow superuser I almost think if they could come up with an algorithm of obvious dupes (name / address) then they should be flagged, thrown in a queue for deletion or removal.
Saw @dens today @w2e