How Would You Rank Hopkins?

A new online ranking system gave Hopkins a respectable “residential & frequented” rating—in part because of its popularity and variety of places to go out.

MapQuest Vibe awarded 5.2 on its 10-point scale. Overall "Vibe Scores" are based on dining, nightlife and shopping destinations, residential-business mix and fuzzy factors such as walkability, popularity and edginess.

( for more details on the categories that affect a community's score.)

Hopkins outscored many of its neighbors. St. Louis Park, which suffered from low walkability, scored a meager .08, and Minnetonka scored a 4.2. On the other end of the spectrum, Golden Valley’s high walkability, going out and popularity scores boosted it to a remarkable 9.1, while Edina scored a near-perfect 9.8.

Numbers are based on the frequency of MapQuest searches for local attractions and businesses and on users' votes for neighborhoods and businesses.

"We have a lot of data points -- billions of data points in fact," the company wrote in an introductory blog post. "These data points collected over 15 years tell us, among other things, where people are, where they are going, what they are looking for and when they are looking for it."

Because it just launched Oct. 13, mqVibe doesn't yet reflect a broad user consensus and is driven partly by "an editorial evaluation," as the company's FAQs put it. Developers acknowledge mqVibe needs crowd clicking to work best.

"It is just the beginning of a revolution in how you discover your city, participate and influence your local community, and explore out of town," Simon Hill of Denver— a principal product manager at AOL, parent company of MapQuest (as well as Patch)— wrote in an Oct. 17 blog post.

In other words, log on and tell people how you really feel about Hopkins.

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Vibe Scores