About Lanc Local
Welcome to Lanc Local
This website began as a passion project and has evolved into a resource for anyone living in or visiting Lancaster County, helping you discover top local businesses.
Lanc Local is a small team that leverages millions of data points to bring you the best Lancaster County businesses in close to a thousand categories, from restaurants to hot water system suppliers.
By quickly finding the best local services and products, you save time, avoid unreliable options, and confidently support businesses that meet your needs.
How we rank businesses
Lanc Local analyzes reviews and testimonials from across the web to determine what businesses stand out from the rest.
Our ranking system analyzes the number of total verified reviews and the average rating of these reviews. Using these two factors, we rank businesses according to their Bayesian average rating. If you’re interested in the details of this average, you can read more about that calculation here.
The advantage of this approach is that businesses with only a few reviews but very high average ratings don’t always appear at the top of the list. While we aim to highlight hidden gems and emerging businesses, we strive to do so without distorting the overall results of a ranked list of businesses.
Where this ranking methodology falls short:
No ranking methodology is perfect, so we want to be transparent about where our ranking method falls short:
- Proximity: We loosely factor in proximity, but it’s certainly not a defining factor. We only analyze Lancaster County businesses at this point. We have lists dedicated to regions within Lancaster County (ex. Ephrata), which also include businesses in areas immediately surrounding Ephrata. We do have a feature with the top businesses in Lancaster County plotted out on a map, but these are not ranked in any particular order.
- New businesses: This one is a tough one for us, as we’re passionate about new or up-and-coming businesses. Unfortunately, given that our ranking methodoly is based on the online “word of mouth” of businesses, it’s hard to rank new businesses that don’t have many reviews (yet). We do actively partner with new businesses and highlight them where applicable. When this is the case, it’s noted.
- Tourist traps: When developing our ranking methodology, we did our best to avoid ranking businesses predominantly on the volume of positive reviews. One reason for this was to avoid tourist traps being too heavily favored in the rankings. There will certainly be some “tourist traps” that are included in some of our lists, but only if the overall experience at these locations was positive for the majority of people. In other words, if a business lives up the hype, they’ll show up on our lists.
- Businesses that match multiple categories: The online review data we’re using to assess and rank businesses is based on people’s experience with an overall business, and not one particular part of that business. For example, if we have a list that ranks top restaurants for breakfast in Lancaster County, we will use review data from all restaurants which offer breakfast. The challenge here is that these reviews will be speaking to more than just breakfast. You may have someone who is reviewing the restaurant’s lunch experience, for example. In this case, that review would be factored into the ranking for the “top restaurants for breakfast.” This can and will skew results in some cases.
We appreciate you stopping by and we hope this website is a helpful resource for you. If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns, please reach out to me directly by emailing rj@lanclocal.com.
Best,
– RJ, Founder of Lanc Local