How we rank businesses

Scores are built from public customer reviews. Nothing else moves a business up or down. A business cannot pay for a position, cannot buy its way past a competitor, and cannot ask an editor for a better one.

The four inputs

Every score on every directory is assembled from the same four inputs. What changes between categories is how heavily each one counts.

1. Review volume

How many public reviews a business has. A high average built on three reviews is a weak claim, and the score treats it as one. Volume is not rewarded on its own, but it establishes how much confidence any average deserves.

2. Recency

How recently those reviews were written. Reviews lose weight as they age, because a review from four years ago describes a business as it was four years ago. Businesses change hands, change staff, and change standards, and the score follows the present rather than the archive.

3. Rating distribution

The shape of the ratings, not only their average. Two businesses can both average four stars: one because nearly every customer gave four, the other because half gave five and half gave two. The second has a consistency problem that an average conceals and a distribution reveals.

4. What reviewers actually say

The text of the reviews, read for the parts of the job that matter for that specific category. This is where the per-category weighting lives, and it is the input that separates two businesses with identical star ratings.

Why the criteria differ from one category to the next

The per-category criteria are different by design, because what makes a good business is not the same in every trade.

A locksmith is scored heavily on response time. Someone locked out at midnight needs an answer and a van, and a locksmith with excellent workmanship who does not pick up after six has failed the job as it is actually experienced.

A homestay is not scored on response time at all. Nobody books one urgently. It is chosen weeks ahead for a specific occasion, so the weighting goes to suitability instead: whether the pool was usable, whether the property held the number of people it claimed, whether it worked for the family or the event it was booked for.

Running one criteria set across every category would force the method to discard exactly the information that helps. Each directory page on this site states its own weighting before it links out to the directory itself.

What the score does not use

Stated explicitly, because this is where most rankings are vague.

• Payment. No business can pay for a position, at any price, on any directory we publish.
• Advertising spend. Not with us, and not anywhere else.
• Commercial relationships. None exist with any listed business. No listed business is a client.
• Price. A cheaper business is not treated as a better one. Where value is scored, it is scored from what reviewers say they received for what they paid.
• How long a business has traded. Longevity is not quality.

The ranking engine is featured-blind: whether a business has paid for anything is not exposed to it at all. That is a structural property rather than a policy of restraint, and it is set out in our editorial standards.

The monthly re-check

Every listing on every directory is re-checked once a month. At that re-check, three things happen.

1. Scores are recalculated against the current body of public reviews.
2. Businesses that have closed are removed automatically.
3. Reference data, where a directory records any, is checked. On the badminton court index that means rates and booking links.

A month is a deliberate choice. Update less often and the directory becomes a museum of businesses that no longer exist. Update constantly and the order jumps on the strength of two new reviews, which teaches readers to ignore it.

What a ranking is, and what it is not

A ranking here is a summary of public evidence, arranged by a rule you can read. That is a real and useful thing, and it is also a limited one, so the limits are worth stating.

It is not an inspection. We do not visit premises, and we do not verify licences or accreditations. It is not a guarantee of the work you will personally receive. And it is imperfect where reviews are thin: a genuinely good business with very few public reviews will sit lower than its work deserves, and the method cannot fix that without inventing evidence.

Used as a filter that narrows a long list to a handful worth your attention, without anyone having paid to survive the cut, it does its job.

If you think a score is wrong

Email hello@meridianguides.my with the business name, the directory it appears on, and what you think is wrong. The target for a standard request is five business days. The full process is on corrections, disputes and removals.

What we will not do is adjust a position by hand as a favour or an apology. The score is the score, and manual adjustment would destroy the only thing that makes it worth reading.