Serious Eats
New Citysearch Site, '3 Buck Bites,' for Finding Cheap Eats
3 Buck Bites, Citysearch's new cheap-eats finder, is a good concept: a directory of tasty meals for $3.99 or less, with recommendations coming from Citysearch editors nationwide and from readers. It's not necessarily a new concept, though; Cheap Ass Food has been mining this ground for a few years now.
Like Cheap Ass Food, 3 Buck Bites has a cheeky attitude and looks like it might be a fun place to find your next inexpensive lunch, dinner, or snack. But it's a little difficult to navigate.
For instance, clicking on the Polaroid-style snapshots takes you to a page on 3 Buck Bites that gives you only the dish's price, popularity as rated by users, and city. But if you actually want to visit the restaurant, you're going to need the street address. For that, you'll have to click the "Go there" link (right), which takes you, unsurprisingly, to the Citysearch official listing.
Seems like a whole lot of unnecessary clicking designed to stoke pageviews for the parent site.
What's more, finding the meat of the mini review for each dish is confusing until you get used to the site layout. It's in a long, narrow column on the right-hand side of the page, a spot most readers expect ads or supplementary info—like, you know, the address, phone number, or restaurant URL. [via The Eaten Path]