All I want from Google Maps is the ability to sort by number of reviews. You can almost get it. If you click a "Busy Area", it will show you a list of businesses in that small area sorted by number of reviews and it's incredibly useful. But if there isn't a "Busy Area" to click on you can't get it, and you can't sort search results that way either.
The crappiness of the ranking and filtering options in Maps search is completely inexcusable. Ranking is Google's core business!
Your comment actually reminds me about a problem I had with my initial data pull. When you search a location/radius, by default Google only lists the "popular" restaurants nearby. I had to change that from the default value to "distance." Otherwise it was skipping restaurants in my search algorithm
The crappiness of the ranking and filtering options in Maps search is completely inexcusable. Ranking is Google's core business!