How Mosey ranked lists are made, and what they can tell you

A Mosey ranked list is a list of places ordered by what people who ate there said about them. The lists are built automatically from ratings left in the Mosey app, and they refresh every week, so they change as more people rate. This guide explains the kinds of list, what puts a place on one and how to use them without over-reading them.

Where the lists come from

Every rating on Mosey is about one meal, with a photo taken at the table. The lists count those ratings. Nobody at Mosey picks a favourite by hand, and a place cannot pay to move up. You can see all the lists on the ranked lists page.

The kinds of list

A city can have up to four kinds of list.

• Top rated orders places by their ratings overall.
• Rated this month shows the places people have rated most recently, which is useful when you want somewhere that is current.
• Trending shows the places with the most ratings over the last fortnight.
• Dishes shows the dishes people photographed most.

Not every city has every list. A list is only made when there are enough places with enough ratings to fill it, so a small town may have none yet. That is a sign of how many people have rated there, not of how good the food is.

One address that keeps improving

Each list keeps the same web address and republishes every week, rather than creating a new page each time. The month is shown in the title so you can see how fresh it is. The list you bookmark today is the same list next month, with newer ratings in it.

What a list can and cannot tell you

A list tells you where people who rated have enjoyed their meals, with photos to back it up. It cannot tell you what suits your table. A list of top-rated places may be full of dinners when you want a quick lunch, and a place with a handful of ratings can sit above one with many.

Use the list to make a shortlist, then check the details. Our guide to reading restaurant ratings and photos shows how to judge a rating, and what Mosey Gold means explains the mark a place earns from ratings alone.

Using a list to choose

Start with your city's top rated list, then open two or three places and look at their recent photos and the most recent ratings. If you want to eat nearby, open the town page, such as Dublin or Kilkenny, which gathers the places, the lists and the guides for that town.

If you already know what you want to eat, search by the dish instead. Our guide to finding a place by the dish shows how.

Helping a list get better

The lists are only as good as the ratings behind them. If you ate somewhere good, rate the meal in the app with a photo of the plate. Our guide to writing a rating that helps the next diner has the details, and the ratings feature page explains how a score is built.

Reading a list alongside the town page

A ranked list is one view of a town. The town page gathers the places, the lists, the walks and the guides in one place, so you can move from a list to the places around it. If a place you like is not on the list, that does not mean it is poorly rated: it may not have enough recent ratings yet. Treat the list as a place to start, and treat your own taste as the final judge. When you try somewhere from a list, rate it, because every new rating nudges the next version of the list.