I just tried it. Top recommendation was Chili's. I can't imagine anybody needs help discovering the clone chain suburban restaurant strip in their home city. It had 2 specials, and was nothing like anything else on my list or anywhere I have checked in, which I assume means it's actually an ad masquerading as a search result with no indication that top rank was bought.
We don't charge merchants money for listing specials, and we don't sell search results. If and when we let merchants advertise on foursquare, all ads will be clearly marked as such.
There are a couple of reasons we might have recommended that Chilli's. Have any of your foursquare friends checked in there? That's a pretty strong signal for us, so that might be why it's showing up so highly. If not, it might be that a lot of people check in to that Chilli's.
That said, there's probably more we can do to detect chain restaurants and either boost them or bury them based on your personal likelihood of visiting chain restaurants. Unfortunately, all our ranking code currently works at the level of individual venues, so there's work for us yet on knowing that the venue is part of a chain and ranking accordingly.
No friends. You had 2 'specials' and a tip. I'm sure a lot of people check in there just due to volume, but volume strikes me as a questionable signal for an 'explore' feature - if everyone already knows it, I probably already know it too. I understand it's a tough problem, but it just looked like an unmarked paid result.
As you suspect, raw volume is a poor signal. We take a lot of other things into account: repeat visits, proportion of visitors that left a tip, the "sentiment" of the tips, etc.
In one sense, that seems kinda inevitable. Way more people check in to FourSquare (and possibly leave a comment/tip) than check in to, say, Fat Duck or Noma.
I suspect your local Starbucks has two orders of magnitude more checkins that the local specialty coffee roaster/espresso bar…
There's still some value there. For some chains (Applebee's is one that comes to mind), some locations are actually pretty decent, while others are worse than fast food.
