Why the same restaurant kept showing up twice in our search
By Bianca @ IsTheKitchenClean
If you searched for Happy Lamb Hot Pot on this site last week, you got ten results. There are four Happy Lamb locations in Chicago. So where did the other six come from?
License numbers. The city's inspection data is keyed by license, and a single restaurant at a single address can hold several of them. A patio license. A liquor license. A new number issued when the business re-licensed under a slightly different name. Each of those numbers gets its own inspection record, sometimes on the same day as the main one.
What that did to our pages
We used to treat every license number as its own restaurant. That meant the Clark Street Happy Lamb had one page with eight inspections and a second, nearly invisible page with two more. The pass rate on each page was computed from its own slice. Neither was the real picture.
It also meant search results padded out with duplicates, and the trending list could in theory show the same kitchen twice if two of its licenses failed in the same window.
What we changed
A restaurant is now defined by its name and its address, not by a license number. When you open any page, we pull in every license the city has filed at that same name and address and merge the histories into one list. The license with the newest inspection becomes the canonical one, and the old links for the other numbers redirect to it, so nothing you've bookmarked breaks.
The Happy Lamb search now returns five results, one per address. The Clark Street page shows all ten inspections and a pass rate computed from all of them.
What we didn't change
We match on the exact address the city recorded. Two of the Chinatown Happy Lamb listings sit at "2306-2312 S Wentworth" and "2312 S Wentworth," which is almost certainly the same building, but we don't merge those. Guessing at address ranges is how you accidentally fold a real neighbor into someone else's record, and we'd rather show you one place twice than two places as one.
If you spot a restaurant that still looks split, the contact page is the fastest way to tell us.
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