Pandora applied to foodNOW

What is the technology behind Pandora? How does Pandora work?

The Music Genome Project

Wikipedia's description: The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them. The company Savage Beast Technologies was formed to run the project. A given song is represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing approximately 150 "genes" (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300–500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, in half-integer increments.

foodNOW

So why can't the same framework be used to describe restaurants? 400 attributes are not necessary, but more than 4 categories (food, service, price and atmosphere) would be necessary to create a useful vector. Comments?

Possible attributes:
-price
-value
-location
-type of food
-type of place
-chef
-trendy
-chain
-take out
-hours
-delivery
-desserts
-liquor diversity
-wine list
-ratings from other sites

This concept can take on many permutations. It would be amazing if the technology could store menus where users could rate their favorite dishes. For example I love carrot cake, but what restaurants in New York serve good carrot cake? Menupages has a function to search by type of food. The website returned a list of restaurants that serve carrot cake, but still ranked via the 4 original categories. Should I assume that because a restaurant is rated well that the place has good carrot cake? No, I cannot come to this conclusion without reading through countless reviews that may or may not talk about dessert. So I what would like what my application to allow you to put in a specific food where it then would provide suggestions on where to find it!

My big idea could offer users an accurate cross-content and cross platform search by taste engine.