How we count

Which posts belong to which shop

A name is not enough. Searching for a restaurant called Donkkaseu Ondo returns posts about Ondo-on in Chungmuro, a different shop in a different city. We once let 30 of those through and the page ended up claiming both that parking was easy and that there was none.

So we only keep a post if its body contains the street address or the phone number of that exact branch. For one restaurant that meant reading 188 posts and setting 47 of them aside. The pages say how many were set aside.

What we count and what we read

Some things can be counted because the words are the fact: a post either mentions an indoor waiting area or it does not. Those become numbers with a denominator — 19 / 141.

Opinions cannot be counted that way. We once counted posts where rain appeared near a positive word and got four; two of them turned out to be small talk about the monsoon season with nothing to do with the restaurant. So for anything evaluative we read the posts, and we say how many we found rather than implying a pattern.

When a claim rests on one post, the page says so. And when nobody wrote about something at all, the page says that too — we do not fill an empty field.

Sponsorship

Korean bloggers who are paid usually disclose it as a hashtag at the very bottom of the post. It is almost never in the title — we checked, and found none in two separate corpora.

We count three states: posts that say they were paid, posts that go out of their way to say they paid themselves, and posts that say neither. We publish all three. An undisclosed paid post looks exactly like the third group, and we say that on every page rather than letting the low disclosure number speak for itself.

Menus and prices

Menu items do not come from scattered mentions. Bloggers write things like "the cutlet set" meaning nothing in particular, and we once turned such a phrase into a menu item that belonged to another branch.

We take menus from posts that transcribed the menu board, and we only keep an item when two independent posts agree on the same name and the same price. Where posts disagree we show the minority figure too, and where a person has checked the shop's own listing we mark the item as checked and date it.

When we are wrong

We are. Each page carries a short list of what changed and why, with dates. The first entries on our first page record that we removed two menu items that belonged to a different restaurant, and that a price we had published was contradicted by the shop's own listing.

If you find something wrong, tell us and the correction will show up in that list.