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##Reviews aggregator

What it's for

Small one-off local businesses are often amongst the best choices for food in urban areas. However, the owners of many of the best cafes and restaurants are ambivalent to the web and its myriad of review sites. Thus visitors to the area, perhaps looking for somewhere more inspired and better value than their hotel restaurant, are unlikely to find these independent cafes and restaurants, which is a pity both for the local businesses and for the visitors settling for a mediocre meal.

This simple PHP mashup simply displays all the reviews Google's found for a particular establishment so that:

• The owner of the establishment can see how they are doing, read their reviews and claim ownership of the property on each of the review sites
• If the establishment has a website or a mobile app then use this code to showcase their reviews and encourage happy customers to leave even more good reviews

Why it's here

Created for the Spring 2012 "Apps for the High St" edition of Hackathon Central in London, where it was used to extend a Rippll AppSplash iPhone/Android app via its Social tab URL.

Usage

Call the URL from any mobile web-browser or from a narrow iframe in a normal webpage. The URL takes one parameter:

• q = the URL-encoded search string you would use to find the establishment in Google, with as much detail as is required to disambiguate this particular business from any others similarly named. For example, there are two Delish+Cafe+Londons (one in Covent Garden and one in Soho), two Delish+Cafe+Sohos (one in UK and one in US) but there is only one Delish+Cafe+Soho+London.

example: http://reviews.host56.com/?q=Wenlock+and+Essex