This weekend I used Yelp and Google Reviews to find a coffeeshop in an unfamiliar town. Both yelp and Google had great ratings of this place and once I arrived, it was obvious that my experience would be very different. This is when the conversations about having a need for a scaling algorithm in ratings once agains surfaced up.

The ability to take an account’s persona into consideration and weighting the account's ratings accordingly [ Expectations would be a huge factor ]. One can argue that this can be done in two phases:

Phase one would be a categorization of ratings. Rather than an overall rating, it would be one category for food and one for service and one overall.

Phase two would be the normalization of these ratings. The normalization algorithm could take many factors: Where the person grew up, user's age , education, previous reviews, etc…

Reviews and ratings are two different matters here. Reviews are subjective by nature and should stay that way. The desire is to normalize and standardize the rating system.