Citysearch Ratings Confuse Me

I'm a yelp girl. In fact, I'm Yelp Elite '08 (woot!).

If you're not familiar with Yelp (and or CitySearch), they are sites where users can review pretty much anything with a physical address - restaurants, coffee shops, stores, salons, etc. I still rely on friends' suggestions and opinions, but I've come to rely on the online reviews more and more as well.

Anyway, Yelp is big in the Bay Area, and I love the UI. I think it's really intuitive and fun. Pretty much every place I ever looked up in the Bay Area had already been reviewed multiple times. Which was great, because obviously more reviews means a greater variance of opinions. In Minnesota, the hotspots have a couple reviews - usually places in Minneapolis or St Paul. But, places in the suburbs tend to not have many (if any) reviews.

And so, if I can't find relevant reviews on Yelp, I'll try CitySearch. I don't like the CitySearch UI. But what really gets me is the star rating. Some locations have 'editorial reviews'. I'm not exactly sure how that works, but I assume CitySearch pays a group of people to review locations. There are also user reviews.

What I've noticed is that some locations have a 'star rating' without any user reviews, and sometimes without an editorial review. Also, for one location, I averaged out the user ratings, and came up with a 2.1, but the 'star rating' was above a 4. I can only assume they factor the editorial ratings heavy..but shouldn't they specify that somewhere? Or maybe I'm the only person who takes the time to count out each review and average it herself :)