A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/07/EDKN1NGO74.DTL

by hardtke • 14 years ago

402 193 14 years ago

ericd2• 14 years ago

Interesting view from the restauranteur. I don't think Yelp would be wise to use his advice directly, though. Allowing businesses to opt out of Yelp would be a terrible idea, because Yelp is much more useful when it has everything. Also, there is doubtless a substantial amount of attempted gaming with the reviews, so attempting to catch this and filtering it out is very important if Yelp is to maintain a reputation of being a trustworthy source of reviews. They should try to reduce false positives, but saying they shouldn't filter anything is silly.

The implications of only being able to help the restauranteur with his bad reviews for money are really terrible, though. I wonder if they still do this after all the bad press surrounding that a while back.

Duff• 14 years ago

Trip Advisor seems to successfully do what Yelp does, minus the extortion and general suckage.

gergles• 14 years ago

I think he meant "opt out of having reviews filtered", not "opt out of being listed on Yelp".

I think that would be a more valuable thing.

ericd2• 14 years ago

Perhaps. But the filtering isn't just to protect the restaurants from fake bad reviews, but also to protect the viewers from fake good ones by the restaurant.

unoti3• 14 years ago

Yelp has really let me down. I'm new to San Francisco, and initially used Yelp to help me figure out where to eat and hang out. Over time I learned that some of its 4.5 star places are dirty Taquerias that really suck, and some of my favorite places to be are poorly rated. (Note: I've got nothing against dirty taquerias, but the food better be good if it's a dirty run down taqueria with 5 stars.) I'm not sure what services are better than Yelp.

I've heard people say in casual conversation that Yelp is "over" and all the people in the know have gone elsewhere. What services should I be using to know where the best places to eat are in San Francisco and Marin?

Sol Food in Marin county, for example, is just worshiped on Yelp with 5 star reviews. But I go there, I wait in line for 30 minutes, get crammed in on a bench with 5 strangers, and get served a steak sandwich that's too tough to chew. What's up with that? I feel like I'm better off using Google Maps and just guessing than looking to Yelp for advice. Anyway, are there better services than Yelp to help me figure out what's actually worth going to?

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Problem is if it gets five star reviews then suddenly more people will go there before they have time to adapt , hence the queuing.

Could also explain the lower food quality too since they may either have overworked staff who will make more mistakes or they have had to hire new staff quickly who they did not have time to select or train properly.

pkulak• 14 years ago

Exactly. You really are better off just trying out random places until you find the good places yourself. It's a fun process, at least! Then, when you find a great place, give it a 1-star review to keep the hoards away. ;) (Just kidding, of course.)

easterisle• 14 years ago

On my first trip down there a few months ago, I used the Foodspotting app and it really helped me out. I think they really nailed what Yelp purports to do.

joshAg• 14 years ago

try ness, if you have an iphone.

ajslater• 14 years ago

One of the problems with Yelp is that burger king has 5 stars, because 'everyone' loves burger king. Ness runs a recommendation algorithm on my quick star ratings and knows what kind of food I like. Ness typically recommends high quality, good value yuppie food to me. Ness's algorithm isn't magic, it isn't great. Its just kind of okay to good. But good is immeasurably better than Yelp, which is useless. I'm not involved with the app in any way other than a happy user: http://www.likeness.com/

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

I used Yelp in the past to check out menus not their reviews. I typically prefer to read reviews from various articles/blogs.

Sometimes both me and my wife would just go out and be adventurous a little bit to try new places or new ethnic foods (but of course we normally avoid high-end places for a try-out).

It's a lifestyle thing (that I blog about once in a while) I suppose.

juiceandjuice• 14 years ago

Actually I've usually noticed that Yelp is horrible because people in SF (and especially, ESPECIALLY Palo Alto) are service and location whores. Places with high reviews tend to be places with good/great service, hip/interesting clientele, and located nearby trendy or popular areas. The stars are loosely correlated to the quality/taste of food.

PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :(

freshfunk4• 14 years ago

Outright hyperbole.

Service and location is one component of the eating experience just as food is. Service and location are ways for similar restaurants to compete against each other.

To call people "service and location whores" speaks to your own condescending attitude that you, ironically, accuse others of.

With that said, in my experience, most places with a decent number of ratings tends to be spot on. The thing is that people need to measure their expectations. If a place is highly rated for cheap sushi or cheap taqueria food, then, obviously, ratings are going to be based primarily on price and less so on decor/food. After all, that is the _value_ that cheap eateries provide.

Yelp features a price indicator ($, $$ or $$$). If one was looking for good, expensive sushi, they could easily search for sushi with $$$. If they found a result where the restaurant had one $, then their expectations should adjust accordingly.

OWaz2• 14 years ago

I have a friend from Italy who finds it odd that Americans demand quick service. He once said that he used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant and the place was rated low because service was slow although the food was great. I suppose we all expect different things from a restaurant. I prefer a quiet place with consistent food without feeling like I'm being rushed.

I don't use Yelp but I do use Goodreads which is a site that allows people to review books. And I find that the book ratings are somewhat reliable. Maybe it's that people who read books and are willing to rate a book are more thoughtful about the process.

jcampbell12• 14 years ago

My advice is to stop trying to optimize every event in life, and live more serendipitously. Pick places at random, have low expectations, and spend your life constantly being pleasantly surprised.

retube• 14 years ago

This. This. This. (Sorry to be so reddit). But seriously the joys of discovering a new city is trial and error. Why on earth follow the cyber crowds when the actual journey of finding new places - whether they turn out to be terrible or tremendous - by itself offers so many experiences and opportunities?

unoti3• 14 years ago

Would it be considered bad, then, to ask my friends where they like to eat, and discuss it? All my friends live in North Carolina.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking over ideas of where to eat with friends. It doesn't mean that I'm living my life wrong.

But let's just say for sake of argument that it's best to always be random and spontaneous. Tonight, you should randomly pick a channel on TV, and watch it. Or randomly select a movie. Maybe you don't watch TV or movies. Then a random book off the library shelf?

I do in general terms like your suggestion about being spontaneous, and living in the moment, and embracing chaos and randomness. And here's a suggestion for you: don't tell other people how to live; it's unseemly.

It's a nice suggestion, to live in the moment and be spontaneous, but it's highly impractical. Sometimes it makes sense to work with more information when it's available. Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse? Sometimes it makes sense to be discerning with limited resources. I'm as zen as the next guy, and live in the moment. I just got to this town, and I'd like to start my search with what people think are the most awesome places to eat. Is that so wrong?

It's surely not as wrong as you guys thinking I'm conducting my life improperly for wanting information about where cool places to eat are.

jacques_chester2• 14 years ago

Living every moment serendipitously has its problems too. Most folk are happier minimising their regrets; review services should help that to occur.

Part of the problem with something like yelp is that there's no way to gatekeep the genuine and false reviews. Netflix or Amazon, for example, know what you actually paid for. Yelp's got no way to know if you really dined at the restaurant or whether you just know the owner.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

No.... not constantly. Spend some of your time being pleasantly surprised. Spend some of your time being underwhelmed with overpriced mediocrity. Spend some of your time horrified by awful food and service. And spend some of your time with your ass welded to a toilet seat most of the day due to food poisoning.

Exploring new restaurants is fun, but also potentially risky and typically needs to be moderated with some degree of caution and preparation.

hammock• 14 years ago

http://wheelof.com/lunch/

thomaspaine• 14 years ago

This strategy doesn't work so great with things like dry cleaners, tailors, and dentists. Yelp has the potential to be incredibly valuable with these types of services but I've been finding that the recommendations and reviews are close to useless.

jordan0day• 14 years ago

I don't know if you're intentionally setting up a false dichotomy or what, but at face value your first sentence is a pretty unhelpful (and glib-seeming) platitude. It's not "always plan everything out to the nth degree or live life with no plans, whatsoever"... there's a lot of space to exist in-between.

Wandering around and finding new places and experiences can be great, but it's not for everyone, and it's certainly not for everyone all the time. There are people who really don't like being "surprised", pleasantly or otherwise. It's not a failing on their part, it's just how they're wired. Services like Yelp are (ostensibly) great for these types of folks, since it allows them to try new things with a little bit of reassurance that if the new thing sucks, it shouldn't suck too bad.

For, say, your tenth wedding anniversary, would you really just show up at the train station with your spouse and your low expectations, hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your randomly-chosen destination?

dgabriel• 14 years ago

The first yelp review I left was a result of serendipity. I was wandering around NYC with my beloved, and we wound up in the worst, most overpriced, awesome-mood-killing bar. It was so bad that I rely on yelp in new cities now. If only I'd looked it up on my phone, I would have saved us some agony. This article makes me sad, because I don't want to miss something great because sn owner is being extorted, but I am also incredibly wary of walking into a place without checking reviews first.

a_a_r_o_n• 14 years ago

Oh, gawd yes. Part of the fun of the world is that it's huge and surprising. Talk to your friends if you need a recommendation. Talk to a total stranger face to face if you need a recommendation.

snowmaker• 14 years ago

This was a totally unexpected, and yet perfectly appropriate response to the parent comment. I hope unoti takes this invaluable advice to heart.

khafra• 14 years ago

You're telling people to settle. Settling can make you happy, or at least satisfied; but it's bad signaling to settle too early.

sshumaker• 14 years ago

Zagat is still pretty good (although you have to pay for ratings), despite declining accuracy of late. The ratings are more 'tuned' to a foodie mindset, plus they separate out food from price, which avoids the common problem you see on Yelp.

I recall seeing 5-stars for a sushi restaurant on Yelp, and after an incredibly disappointing meal, I went back to the site and read the reviews. They were all along the lines of "Sushi for under $4! Awesome!." I don't care if it's 4$. If it's bad sushi, it doesn't matter if it's free. I'd rather eat something else. Or maybe the food is great but the service sucks. By conflating all of these categories into a single rating, you end up with ratings that aren't very useful to a lot of people.

No doubt, personalized ratings are the way to go in the future - but none of the apps I've seen (Ness included) seem to do a very good job of this yet.

rdl• 14 years ago

I find chow.com to be the best way to discover specific new restaurants. I use Yelp to find menus and hours, and to locate the names of a bunch of suitable e.g. watch repair shops in the area, but gave up on their ratings and reviews a few years ago (approximately the time they hired a bunch of salespeople and started extorting businesses...)

A Facebook review site where I got reviews just from my friends (or domain experts, ideally also selected by my friends). Right now, Quora and Foursquare seem to be the way to use "friend networks" to find stuff, and then domain-specific sites like chow (for foodies), wis (for watches), etc. too.

ghaff• 14 years ago

Agreed. For areas that Zagat covers, I find it to be a lot more consistent and consumable than Yelp. With Yelp, I find myself having to read through reviews and trying to apply context to the reviews and I still find the recommendations more random overall. I still use Yelp, but if I'm looking for a quick "Where do I eat on this business trip that's near my hotel?" Zagat is quick and unlikely to steer me (too) wrong.

I agree with another poster who recommended Chowhound--again if you're willing to spend some time reading rather than just looking for a quick 2 or 3 restaurants to choose from.

ja2ke• 14 years ago

I love Sol Food and eat there all the time. It's one of my favorite restaurants in the bay area. I would give it 5 stars in a second.

That's the other problem with this whole thing, I guess. Yelp's content is basicallu 100% subjective.

unoti3• 14 years ago

Maybe it just didn't work out well that day for some reason and I should give them another shot. I thought maybe the love came from 2 years ago, and they've slipped, but perhaps not...

eweise• 14 years ago

When Sol Food had their original restaurant the food was good and it was fairly cheap. Now the prices have gone up and they give you less. Like the side salad used to have lots of avocado now it doesn't have any. Glad its there though since there are not very many good eating options in Marin.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

Agreed. Some great places in New York get low reviews for being "too expensive". That's fair in some cases but some ingredients and methods are expensive - don't order a truffle pasta with a puff pastry dessert and then complain that it costs more than Shake Shack.

We once again land up with the situation where Chipotle routinely outranks Michelin rated restaurants.

A better method might be bilateral context-aware ratings, e.g. for a nice dinner would you rather go to X or Y? Troublesome for a start-up due to the amplified network effect, but tenable for a site with an established user base.

jrockway5• 14 years ago

I noticed this too. I recently moved to Brooklyn Heights, and every review of every restaurant complains about price. Well yeah, dude, it's Brooklyn Heights. You're paying Manhattan prices for the privilege of not being in Manhattan :)

showerst• 14 years ago

I usually skim a number of reviews on Yelp/Amazon, so that I can get a feel of the reviews for people who have similar taste to me. If someone gives a decent restaurant in DC or NY 1 star based on the price and then suggests I go to the Applebees down the street, I can just filter that out.

On the flip side, ratings are not absolute -- when I'm reading reviews of a take-out burrito joint, I'm not looking for an 8 course meal, and it's possible that the local chipotle really is 5 stars among available burrito joints. My expectations of Per Se are really high, so maybe if I go there and get a meal that's 'only' awesome, it gets 4 stars, without that being inconsistent.

Perhaps better filtering could be done by taking price more into account, or asking users to 'class' a restaurant? (Take out, family, sit-down, gourmet, etc)

ryguytilidie2• 14 years ago

There is already an app that does exactly this that is much better than yelp:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ness-dining-guide/id454869181...

lrobb• 14 years ago

Yelp has really let me down

Following the crowds is rarely worth the effort, whether it's the popular-kids crowd, or the brogrammers.

jorgeortiz853• 14 years ago

I work for Foursquare, so I'm obviously biased, but I think Foursquare Explore is a great way to find good places to eat.

https://foursquare.com/explore

Our recommendations are based on 30 million tips (short recommendations, <= 200 characters) left by our users all over the world. They also take into account the popularity of the venue, the likelihood of people leaving tips there, the time of day, the day of week, and many other factors.

If you have a check-in history with foursquare, or if you have friends that use foursquare, we'll make personalized recommendations. We'll recommend things we think you'll like based on your check-in history and your friend's check-in histories, and we'll highlight which of your friends have been to the places we're recommending, and how often.

The product isn't perfect yet, and there are definitely some big deficiencies if you try to use it as a Yelp replacement (notably, foursquare lacks: hours, webpage links, whether they deliver or not, etc). But it's constantly improving, and it's already pretty good.

</shameless plug>

m0nastic• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, I just gave it a try and it seemed to make some pretty good recommendations (including places my friends have been to a lot but I've never heard of).

I don't really use recommendation sites/apps, because I've never found any of them to be useful (I find Yelp to be worthless), but I'd actually use this.

I totally didn't even know that was a thing in Foursquare. I use Foursquare almost exclusively to catalog where I go out to places, so I can remember later when the last time I was there was.

mikeocool• 14 years ago

As someone who doesn't work at Foursquare, I agree! If you're friends use Foursquare, Explore is a great way to find places to eat nearby.

Even if none of your friends have ever written a tip, I've found that seeing that one of my friends has been to restaurant 3 or 4 times is great way to find good places to eat or drink.

pkteison3• 14 years ago

I just tried it. Top recommendation was Chili's. I can't imagine anybody needs help discovering the clone chain suburban restaurant strip in their home city. It had 2 specials, and was nothing like anything else on my list or anywhere I have checked in, which I assume means it's actually an ad masquerading as a search result with no indication that top rank was bought.

Yhippa• 14 years ago

I just checked this out. Near where I live in the suburbs I got mostly recommendations for chains which I expected since that's really all there is around here. When I get closer to the city where there are fewer chains the restaurants I consider legit that I would recommend show up.

Just for kicks I tried San Francisco since Yelp did such a terrible job with recommendations when I was there last time. Sure enough I got a host recommendations that I would consider trying next time I'm out there.

I think for this to be better you could tweak the relevancy based on different psychographic profiles. For example maybe show different results for a foodie, family, and maybe a "safe mode" for out-of-towners which would display a mix of results from the prior two.

davidw2• 14 years ago

As a complete aside, one of the things I dearly miss about life in the US is good Mexican food. I would love to be able to eat in a dirty taqueria... sigh.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

Mexican food has got to be the easiest cuisine to replicate in your own kitchen.

OWaz2• 14 years ago

Where do you live? I'm in Southern Arizona and there are a variety of places (upscale to roadside carts) that offer Mexican food that's similar to Sonoran cuisine. You just need to travel south.

And I'll throw in my two cents. I've never used Yelp to find a restaurant. Usually I depend on asking locals in person or I read daily/weekly papers to see what places they write about.

mattlong• 14 years ago

I grew up in San Antonio, TX and now live in the bay area. There is a marked difference in the Mexican cuisine available between the two. The bay area focuses way too much on cream sauces, mangos, avacados, and other California-isms. The offerings in Texas seem to be much more inline with Mexican cuisine that I've had throughout Mexico and the rest of Central America. New Mexico also has a distinct variety that tends to be a mix of Mexican and Native American offerings.

rpweber• 14 years ago

I created a service a couple years back as a yelp alternative called www.hotspotrobot.com, that basically aggregates "best of" lists from zagat, michelin, local papers, etc. The coverage is best in NYC, but it also works in SF. Hopefully it's helpful!

biturd• 14 years ago

Sol Food customers in San Rafael are like Apple fan boys. It's a strange thing. I've heard people raving about it that haven't been there before.

Chipotle is becoming much of the same in reviewership. I personally feel there's too much variation in quality from one Chipotle to the next.

I do agree, Sol Food is not worth the review points it gets. It's confusing for a first time visitor — communal eating isn't something I'm always in the mood for — prices are too high for the quality in my opinion.

I belive Sol Food gets the bulk of young teens to early twenty somethings that haven't yet really experienced a wide variety of eating establishments. Coming from fast food or the "Ramen Lifestyle" would indeed make one give a place like Sol Food a great review along with that cult following.

The trouble with Yelp for me is the tally of "x" stars review. That doesn't easily tell you about the place that has excellent food but is a 60 year old dump. Yelp needs to do something to change the way they average the star ratings with price, quality, service, atmosphere, etc. Do all this on one page, in as little space as possible, and they may hold out for the long haul without being relegated to something like eBay. eBay, Yelp, Pay-Pal... All the lesser of no other evils... Why change?

I personally care most about food quality/taste with service second in importance. The rest doesn't matter to me often, aside from special occasions like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. A preference that allowed simple weighting of their more granular star rating system could be a good start.

Even with everything fixed, there's been far too many reports of "shady" practices with ratings dependent on whether or not you advertise with Yelp or not for me to personally trust them.

Someone will come along with bark, chirp, squeal, or hiss soon enough.

arebop• 14 years ago

Two common complaints I have heard about Yelp are (1) its ratings are not personalized and (2) it took bribes.

Google tried "hotpot," now "places" with personalized recommendations and no pay-to-play scandals but hardly anyone uses it. My recommendations are OK but not great and I suspect the problem is that they don't have enough data to predict well for me.

I hear (from this discussion) that ness does well with personalized recommendations. I have not heard of it before.

Why does everyone use Yelp rather than Google Places or Ness?

Zephyr3142• 14 years ago

One can filter search results based on price ($-$$$$) or other categories (waiter service etc) to weed out the cheaper places. This works well if you are looking for 5-star+fancy as opposed to 5-star+thrifty.

roguecoder• 14 years ago

TripAdvisor has restaurant reviews and doesn't filter them at all: I've had good luck.

ekianjo• 14 years ago

Ask strangers in the street. If they are civil enough you would get pretty good recommendations from locals. They have more experience and no incentive to bullshit you. I have been doing that everytime i go somewhere new, and it works well. It gets me to places I would have never found otherwise, and if the chef knows the person who got me there, I usually get preferential treatment and it becomes a subject of conversation. Thats probably how people knew where to eat before all these online services.

cs702• 14 years ago

For restaurants, I've had a good experience with OpenTable's and Zagat's ratings. Both are consistently reliable -- no nasty surprises so far. (FWIW, the best way to access OpenTable reviews is to search for a reservation in a particular area, and then sort by the number of stars.)

For bars and the like, I've had a good experience with Zagat's specialty guides -- e.g., http://www.zagat.com/product/specialty-guides/san-francisco-...

hkuo• 14 years ago

Foodspotting has helped me discover a ton of great places. #1) it's completely user-driven #2) it focuses on local, what's around you, and #3) most important of all, your primary way of browsing is through pictures of actual food, taken by the users themselves.

Screw Yelp and their reviews. You'll have to invest at least 5 minutes actually reading through paragraphs and paragraphs of people's ramblings.

With foodspotting, I just let me eyes do the discovering. And because it's user-driven, it's assumed that if someone took the time to take a photo and post it that they thoroughly enjoyed it. Also, because you're looking at photos of food, you're seeing actual dishes being served, and the most popular ones at that. On Yelp, you're browsing by food type (Mexican, italian etc), and maybe you can click to their website to view the menu. On Foodspotting, you skip all that and see the food you'll actually get.

Sorry if I've rambled a bit, but I'm just a huge fan of their app.

angryasian• 14 years ago

i actually think their interface makes it terrible as a discovery , but helps when finding a place and seeing pictures of items from a venue.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

The old Chowhound forums are still the go-to spot for really getting some good advice about restaurants in a new area, at least for me. You need to browse around a bit, but you can really get some great recommendations, from low-brow to high-brow, it's still the best place for foodies to go that I've found. http://chowhound.chow.com/boards

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

We see this on other rate/review sites too. I think it's an inherently human problem. It's almost like a popularity contest in high school, the people that get the most votes might actually make the worse friends while those who get the least votes are the type of friends that are much more loyal.

pbreit3• 14 years ago

The one example you provide (Sol Food) is not good. Sol Food gets very good reviews from just about everywhere (TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon, Google, Zagats, OpenTable etc). Which 4.5 and 5 star taquerias are you referring to?

zemo• 14 years ago

I like Foursquare explore because everyone in my office uses it. If I want some overpriced, whole-grain, organic and unprocessed artisanal foods that will leave me feeling like I can punch through cinder blocks, I look for places that Steve checks into, cause that guy loves that shit. Also, he sits across from me, so I can say "Hey Steve, you've been to Tony's Sandwiches, what's it like?". Or maybe I want some really cheap greasy bullshit, and I know that Dave is a cheap bastard, so I look for places that he's checked into. Etc. Searchable, local reviews by people I know.

It's not useful if you don't have friends that use it. It's kinda like last.fm: not actually worth using until you're already using it. Some things you have to see to believe in; others you have to believe in to see. Foursquare is the latter, not the former.

Katelyn• 14 years ago

I use foursquare for finding the best places to eat and drink. The tips people leave about places are concise, meaningful and for the most part, pretty accurate. Not only do you know the person's been there, but you can see how many times they've checked-in to that particular location which can be telling.

It's likely you'll find a lot of like-minded ppl on foursquare, too.

acgourley• 14 years ago

For popular times like lunch and dinner you can hardly go wrong with just looking for places with full tables. Watch how people vote with their feet, and then order what they order.

syeren• 14 years ago

I'm really looking forward to the day that this 'business practice' of Yelp's comes to a broader audience.

While I agree that you can say this is a business model, I can't agree that it is morally correct in anyway, even in a world of capitalism.

dminor• 14 years ago

I think his worry for the investors is misplaced - the BBB has been running a similar racket for years and seems to be doing just fine.

ebbv• 14 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking. And the BBB has been doing this so well for so long that lots of (stupid) people think that it's an actual government agency with power to get businesses in trouble.

learc83• 14 years ago

Back when I used to work retail, we constantly had customers who thought that the BBB was a government agency that would force us to do what they wanted.

_ouxp• 14 years ago

One of the problems with Yelp in my city is the "Yelp elite". To bootstrap in my city, Yelp hired a community manager (part of their job is also writing reviews), and enlisted a bunch of people to become "Yelp Elite", earning access to parties in exchange for posting (it seems) daily reviews.

The result has been a high quantity of lengthy, some-times entertaining, low-information reviews posted by people whose advice I wouldn't likely take if I met them in person.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_busin...

dlikhten• 14 years ago

funny thing is that complaining about it is doing nothing. People use it, and don't care for how schemy it is.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

Consumer Reports was way ahead of their time.

Any site that accepts advertising is automatically tainted. (CR never takes advertising.) Yelp wants its reviews to be believed and for establishments to pay for advertising.

Maybe they're good at balancing the two, but when it comes time to close the quarterly report, you know which one is going to win out.

ericb2• 14 years ago

This is very interesting. Perhaps this is Yelp's Achilles heal. A non-advertising based review site could be far more credible. Maybe some sort of freemium model could take them down by virtue of being more credible...

twoodfin• 14 years ago

Isn't that what you'd call Zagat's? (Bought by Google a while back, somewhat surprisingly.)

damncabbage• 14 years ago

Yelp really is the cool-startup version of the Better Business Bureau.

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

I've never used Yelp, beyond stumbling on the site when looking for restaurant reviews through Google. But as a follower of technology news, I have read much about it and its controversies. Add this one to the pile. It definitely calls into question their slogan, "Real People. Real Reviews."

But even if the controversies are unfounded...$1.5BB blows my &!%#ing mind. My personal perception is that I'm not even sure I trust the reviews.

localhost3000• 14 years ago

I have a product in the local restaurant space. As a result I talk to lots of restaurant people - staff, primarily. It is overwhelming the vitriol I hear from them toward Yelp. Many people downright despise it.

arscan2• 14 years ago

The lack of transparency isn't surprising to me, as that's basically industry practice when it comes to the "special sauce" algorithms that power these recommendation engines (google, tripadvisor, whoever).

But the extortion part does surprise (horrify?) me. I'd love to see some more concrete proof that advertising on yelp results in a friendlier filter function for that business. I assume that there is enough publicly available information (just by scraping their site) to establish some kind of correlation between advertising and filter-friendliness, if one exists. Any of you up for the challenge?

I'd settle for seeing those communications w/the sales team referenced in the article, though.

jaylevitt2• 14 years ago

You don't actually need to make the filter friendlier to advertising. Rankings change every time they re-run the algorithm. You hint that things will be better if I advertise; 50% of the time, that's true.

http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html

aamar• 14 years ago

If that correlation existed, it wouldn't still indicate causation, i.e. that advertising causes the filter bias to change. Maybe the companies who eschew planting fake reviews are also the ones who are willing to pay for advertising.

Yelp has repeatedly, strenuously denied the extortion claims, yet the accusations continue to come. I think a phone recording by one of these accusers would be an excellent smoking gun. Or if someone here calls on behalf of a restaurant or other business (that they have a stake in and has filtered reviews), they could report back to us on what happened. In the meantime, I'm inclined to apply the "innocent until proven guilty" principle in favor of Yelp.

arscan2• 14 years ago

Very true! Thanks for gently pointing out that hole in my logic. The leap from correlation to causation is a very big one. Anyhow, like you, until I see something other than restaurateurs complaining, I'll give Yelp the benefit of the doubt here.

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

I lived in roughly the same place for the last 20 years, so yelp is very interesting to me. I often notice poor ratings where I believe high ratings are deserved, but also low ratings where high ratings are deserved.

danso• 14 years ago

I've been a Yelp user for years, and I was even an "Elite User" for awhile...and I had never heard of "filtered reviews" until now. In fact, if you go to the page of the OP's business, once you actually find the "Filtered Reviews" link (which is in very light gray), clicking on it brings a CAPTCHA...

http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco

What the hell??

Even as a user determined to see what the fuss is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. So I'm guessing nobody actually clicks through to the filtered reviews, whatever they actually are.

I love that Yelp helps me find interesting places in a dense area like NYC, but their business model is appalling.

NameNickHN• 14 years ago

> Even as a user determined to see what the fuss > is about, I don't even jump through this hoop.

I just did and I'm astounded that this filter even exists. From what I saw I got the feeling that the filter mechanism is broken.

mLewisLogic• 14 years ago

So... I might be a bit biased (co-founder at Fondu http://fondu.com), but this really is a major problem.

Most restaurant owners we've talked to are afraid of Yelp and the power that it wields. From an investor standpoint it does a great job monetizing it's community. The problem is that Yelp essentially weights the scales, depending upon who is paying them ad money.

Whereas Google did a great job by separating church and state (search and ads), Yelp happily blends the two together. The end result is a little bit of fact and a little bit of fiction.

YMMV, but we think discovering through trusted friends rather than group averages is how the future looks.

parfe3• 14 years ago

A single helpful Yelp review lays out what happened with this establishment: It ain't what is used to be. They've moved from North Beach to a new location closer to Fisherman Wharf. They probably get alot of tourists. The food is okay...but not as delicious as it was when the other "Italian" owners had it. Where are the Italian waiters who brought so much harm and courtesy to their customers.

Instead of acknowledging these changes as the source of discontent, he blames customers and the review site for pointing issues out. Instead of penning op-eds he should be training his staff, buying higher quality ingredients, and listening to customer complaints.

Owners who hate Yelp ignore the near real time feedback they would never get in person. Complaints posted Fri - Sun more often than Mon - Thur: maybe it you need to look at who works what shifts? Calamari rubbery: Did someone properly train the line cooks? Food called bland, mediocre, bad, or unremarkable: Maybe you should go back to the higher quality ingredients you decided to skimp on to "make more money"?

Yelp looks to be a great way to avoid the death spiral restaurants commonly find themselves in.

Not making enough money? Buy lower quality ingredients. Still not making enough money? Raise prices. Repeat until you lose all regular business and rely on unsuspecting first timers who begrudgingly pay and never return. Eventually close it down.

ericb2• 14 years ago

Really? Is it possible that an analogous review exists on a competitor who advertises with Yelp, but on that page the "review" is filtered?

It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff.

jrockway5• 14 years ago

That could be the case. Customers are unpredictable and you will have to work very hard to please them all.

But if all your reviews are negative, it's possible you are doing something wrong. Restaurants are one of those professions where you have to be good at more than one thing; you have to design great menus, you have to buy good food, and you have to hire and manage good staff. As a chef, you may consider your ability to make a great menu the only thing that matters. Unfortunately, your customers disagree, thus causing the restaurant to fail. Sorry, that's life. (Same goes for great doctors that hire incompetent staff. I've had to stop going to a doctor I liked for that reason.)

freshfunk4• 14 years ago

WRT prejudiced reviews, venues that have a decent number of reviews usually reach some sort of average weighting such that aberrations hardly affect the star rating. That's why 5 star places still have 1 star reviews and 1 star places have 5 star reviews.

parfe3• 14 years ago

>Is it possible that an analogous review exists on a competitor who advertises with Yelp, but on that page the "review" is filtered?

I suppose, but the opinion article included no such information and neither has anyone else. It is possible to read filtered comments. Generating some basic statistics shouldn't be a problem for anyone who wanted to make a genuine claim that Yelp games ratings for advertising dollars. Until then, this submission is sour grapes.

>It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff

Yep! Could be the same exact run of the mill Italian food cooked exactly the same. Of course, a nice dining room, with food served by a native Italian speaker, and a fancy ambiance could very legitimately bump someone's opinion of a restaurant to the next level. Dining out isn't only about the flavor on the plate.

The comment should give the owner second thoughts of leaving his old staff behind. Maybe the owner doesn't think it important, but when a waiter can't pronounce an item on the menu or describe the ingredients knowledgeably it really breaks the experience of eating out.

sedev5• 14 years ago

I wish the article headline had said that the piece was by a restauranteur. Most of what they have to say about Yelp falls under the heading of "more of the same."

I think that restaurant and venue owners are wrong to hate Yelp - but it's understandable that they do. The reasons that they do are interesting. My take on it is that Yelp is disruptive to a lot of the traditional restaurant practices. Restaurant owners resent Yelp because it feels like they're adding more work to what is already a job that requires 80-hour weeks. Previously, restaurant owners had more message control about their venue's location, because social information like "is the Foo Pizzeria any good?" had more friction, it spread more slowly, and it degraded over time.

A Yelp review has low friction because it gets automatically ingested into Yelp's data set, it spreads quickly, and it doesn't degrade over time - it stays around on the site. If you're a business with a small number of reviews, it doesn't take many one-stars to make you look unappealing, and Yelp's attempts to be user-friendly mean that you're presented among a crowd of your competitors unless you earn a clickthrough. Like being on a crowded shelf at the supermarket, you're at the mercy of the visitor.

One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is "Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what I do, not to what a stranger on the Internet inflicts on me?" That's a reasonable objection - and that's why Yelp has invested a shit-ton of engineer-hours into filtering reviews. Filtering reviews is something that benefits both restauranteurs and users - it's just that the former tend to be ungrateful pricks about it because "filtering" includes "removing algorithmically detectable friends-and-family five-star reviews." Which leads to the other big interpretation - that restauranteurs are reacting badly to their customers' newfound ability to hold them accountable. We humans are dumb monkeys with a truckload of cognitive biases: we hate being held accountable. I look at articles like this one and I see big parallels to other whiny people who suddenly are brought into accountability and are resisting it.

The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry, cannot win this one in the long term (at least not on the terms that they now use to define "winning"). There's no way to keep people from talking about your business. There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy. There's no way to keep people from taking the easy way - "I feel like pizza, I'll look it up on Yelp" - instead of a harder way - "I feel like pizza, let's see which of my friends knows where the pizzerias are around here, which of them are available, what their phone numbers and/or locations are, or I know, I could go get the huge inconvenient yellow pages and make a choice based on how much they spent on advertising!" Computing devices will get more convenient to use, not less, knowledge will get easier to share, not less, and the cost of querying the Internet's collective opinion will be cheaper, not more expensive. The restaurant and venue owners are never, ever going to win this the way they want to - again like the MPAA and newspapers, the cat is entirely out of the bag.

Basically what I think they should do about it is

* Stop whining

* Read Seth Godin

* Compete instead of sue

As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few mental filters.

* Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews

* Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews

* Assume that anything at 3.5 stars or above is Good Enough, and use other sources when you want to have rarefied tastes catered to (Yelp started out as being mostly for foodies - I think it's moved out of that, and that if you are or desire to become a serious foodie, you should release yourself from caring about Yelp)

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

You make an interesting observation about reviews not degrading over time. That would seem like something that benefit both Yelp and the places that are reviewed - Yelp's review averages would be fresher, and venues that may have greatly improved over time in response to low initial reviews would be rewarded with stronger-weighted recent reviews.

sedev5• 14 years ago

Yeah, I added a bit of a qualifier there to try to make it clear that I was talking about how humans read reviews - for all I know, Yelp reviews do algorithmically get less important over time. That'd be a smart thing to do.

Zephyr3142• 14 years ago

If you click on "Trend" in the "Rating Distribution" panel you can see avg rating over time.

moreorless2• 14 years ago

Why is it wrong for restaurant owners to hate Yelp if they are constantly running into roadblocks when trying to ask for transparency on how they filter the reviews and the only way that Yelp can help is if the owners are willing to pay for Yelp's services? It nothing short of extortion.

Basically what I think Yelp should do is

* stop extorting entrepreneurs

* be more transparent

sedev5• 14 years ago

They're wrong not only for the reasons that I listed at the end of the post (the factors that make Yelp and Yelpalike business work, are not going their way) but also because they keep asking for the impossible. Yelp can't give venue owners the transparency they're asking for, because that means also giving them the information that they'd need to game the system. It's the same reason that Google only speaks in broad terms about its search updates: after a certain point, the information that you need to see to prove that the system is fair, is the exact same information that you need to see in order to exploit the system. So neither Google nor Yelp shows it, and I'm fine with that.

jsharpe• 14 years ago

That said, it's pretty disturbing if this part is true:

  Over the past year, I have attempted to get some clarity
  and assistance from Yelp. I have had no success except
  that its sales staff has repeatedly advised that if
  we would only advertise with them, they could "help us."

In order for a site like Yelp to be trustworthy, its editorial and advertising people need to be totally separate.

sedev5• 14 years ago

Sure, disturbing if true. But restauranteurs keep saying that, and keep failing to prove it - critically, they fail to prove it under oath. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp,_Inc.#Criticism_of_reviews is a good place to start digging, check their cites.

valuegram2• 14 years ago

The problem with Restaurant owners hating yelp, is they are yelp's customers. They need to figure out a better way to monetize their business, because selling ads to the people who loathe them probably won't work for long.

I have a local business, and while we have great overall reviews, we have had MANY reviews filtered out by yelp's super-secret algorithms that are from actual customers. We also have a bad review that is by someone that has never visited our business, but is not filtered - despite our contacting yelp several times. All this is fine, overall we have great reviews - the problem is yelp has been contacting us weekly to run ads with them. Why would we run ads to bring people to a page that doesn't represent our business accurately?

Furthermore, the cost per impression/clicks is ridiculously high compared with the industry standards.

That being said, from the consumer perspective, I appreciate and frequently use yelp. ...I think they provide a valuable service, they just need to implement a better monetization method before I would consider investing.

sedev5• 14 years ago

That right there: bingo - that's why I think that Yelp is coming out on top of this. They're delivering value to the website visitors/app users. Not that either company is a paragon of virtue, but compare Yelp to Apple and yourself to an iOS app developer and I suspect you'll have an accurate picture of who's where on the totem pole (cf Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/nack_control ).

If Yelp were dedicated to making its advertisers happy, it would quickly become useless for its users.

hristov• 14 years ago

So you try to think of all kinds of speculative reasons why restauranteurs hate yelp, but do not bother listening to what they say. Restauranteurs are very clear and vocal about why they hate yelp -- it is because Yelp uses reviews as a way to blackmail them into buying advertisements in Yelp. That is pretty fucked up behaviour and has been confirmed by many people many times.

By the way most restaurants have always relied on customer satisfaction to attract customers. This is true for most small businesses but it especially true for small restaurants. And this was true before yelp and even before the internet. A restaurant where each customer goes only once is usually doomed to failure (the exceptions are places in tourist traps and high traffic locations ... these restaurants are usually reliably awful, but they are the minority).

If you are the usual non-franchise non-tourist trap restaurant, you cannot afford much advertising or promotion. Your best hope for customers is someone wandering in, being happy and coming back again. Or maybe even telling their friends.

So the idea that restauranteurs now hate yelp because yelp somehow forces them to up their game is silly. Most of them have always relied on customer satisfaction as their main driver of business.

irq11• 14 years ago

"Restauranteurs are very clear and vocal about why they hate yelp -- it is because Yelp uses reviews as a way to blackmail them into buying advertisements in Yelp. That is pretty fucked up behaviour and has been confirmed by many people many times."

No, it's been alleged many times -- by unreliable sources. It's never been shown to be true, and in fact, the allegations that have made it to court have been dismissed for lack of evidence:

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/4622094-478/extortion-law...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020450530457700...

cpeterso• 14 years ago

You paint restauranteurs' dislike for Yelp as fear of customer feedback, but I think their complaint is that Yelp has a secret (and seemingly extortionist) process for filtering positive or negative reviews depending on whether the restauranteur pays Yelp.

freshfunk4• 14 years ago

It's funny because many years ago I read comments from people saying, "Yelp cannot last."

Then a few years after that, "It's a fad and it will die."

The a couple years after that, "When people catch on, they'll disappear!"

And, now, on the day that they went public, there are people still harping that Yelp's days are numbered.

Really? Remember they used to say that about Google (and still say they about Facebook).

Yelp is a reality that will _not_ go away. Venues have to adjust to the modern day reality that it's easy for people to share information. As you said, "There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy."

If Yelp did disappear, it wouldn't be because people "wised" up or because of some court order. But if they did, there are plenty to take its place. Facebook, Foursquare, or any other social media website that supports ratings of venues.

lhnn• 14 years ago

Yelp apparently does what the BBB does: Extort people by offering "brand cleanup" in exchange for advertising dollars. A disgusting business practice, and I'm sure to pass this along to my "social network".

gphil• 14 years ago

This is not the first time this has come up on HN:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yel...

jrockway5• 14 years ago

I disagree with all of his points. You shouldn't be able to opt out; if I want to post a review of your business on the Internet, that's my decision to make, not yours. (What's next, politicians opting out of news coverage? Yeah right.)

Review filtering is similar; Yelp is allowed to express editorial oversight over their website. Specifically, they try to reduce fraud. Your credit card company doesn't discuss their fraud detection algorithms, so why should Yelp?

All I see here is, "I like my own restaurant, but other people don't. Shut down the review site so nobody can tell anyone else!"

Steko• 14 years ago

So you're cool with the "we're going to filter primarily good reviews" and "advertise with us at just about the worst rates in the free world and we'll clean up the bad reviews?" extortion angle?

jrockway5• 14 years ago

Convince me it's extortion and I might agree with you, but I've read many filtered and unfiltered reviews and it seems that Yelp does a fine job filtering. The filtered reviews sound like morons or shills; the unfiltered reviews sound like customers sharing an experience. Paying Yelp to advertise doesn't seem to be a factor.

I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine. I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually used it.)

And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to be from businesses with some problem.

pbreit3• 14 years ago

Those two claims are totally false.

jeremymims• 14 years ago

This issue comes up quite a bit. Since OwnLocal works with a number of small businesses, we've heard many so-called "horror" stories.

What it boils down to is Yelp filters positive reviews for effusiveness (and ALL CAPS), personal connections with the business owner or employees, rapid review acceleration from first-time Yelp users, or users from the same IP address.

What this article doesn't mention is that many small business owners understand how important Yelp is and actively try to game the system in blatant and unsophisticated ways. Their friends write five star reviews about how wonderful the owner is and how they always have their anniversary dinner there. They create multiple fake accounts and complain loudly that their positive reviews have been filtered.

We've also noticed a certain tone businesses and their friends use. They don't typically describe a particular experience, they describe a business in generalities and will often refer back to what other reviewers are saying. They also appear to take what other people think very personally.

The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends.

A common looking filtered review (notice effusiveness, caps wording, and referencing other reviews):

"This is a NICE restaurant - one that you go to when you want a quiet meal away from the kids - it's definitely not family-oriented, but then again, not every restaurant needs to be. If you're used to Olive Garden as your Italian "go-to place", then you will probably be disappointed in Fior d'Italia. If you want REAL Italian food, then ignore the naysayers and come here."

Yelp itself has rough stats for the breakdown of reviews:

5 stars: 38% 4 stars: 29% 3 stars: 14% 2 stars: 8% 1 star: 11%

Yelp's little secret is actually that the star ratings don't provide very much granularity for the casual review reader to make a decision and that most restaurants average out to ~3.75 or in Yelp parlance ~3.5 - 4 stars.

dbcfd3• 14 years ago

> The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends.

Or they actually really like the business? It's not staffed by 30 different no names, and you never get the same server? The owner will actually be present and greet customers?

That's not gaming the system, that's providing great service in a fast food lifestyle.

sheraz• 14 years ago

Mr. Larive is spot on in his opinion, and I think he offers good solutions to the dilemmas of business response and participation.

Yelp is representative of a fundamental problem with so many review sites, and our society at large -- namely that it attempts to coalesce many dimensions of data (a person) into a single score.

And, just like FICO, and the SAT/LSAT/etc, Yelp and its predecessors (BBB) attempt to do the same for businesses.

Worse still, they rely on the "Wisdom of Crowds" when it comes to qualitative measure and taste. An average 2.5 stars tells me nothing, especially because I'm an elitist prick and think the average Yelp commenter is an idiot.

I fear that people substitute a Yelp rating for their own critical-thinking, and that is wrong. It is just as wrong that schools judge students largely based on a single test score. It is wrong that lending happens based on a opaque algorithm.

I fear that Yelp is just another symptom that our society is sick. Our brains have atrophied to the point where we only look for one number that determines the succes or failure of our education, our lives and our livelihood.

Or is that a touch melodramatic?

danbmil99• 14 years ago

Funny story. I recently was going to order out from a Chinese restaurant that I had recently ordered from before and recall enjoying. I had to google the number, and in so doing came up with a couple terrible Yelp reviews. For some reason I decided to listen to the toobz instead of relying on my own judgement. Ended up ordering horrible greasy food from a better-rated, well-known jaunt.

TL; DR: I let Yelp override my own experience, what's up with that?

crikli• 14 years ago

Nobody gives a crap that the restaurant has been there 125 years, but that's what the owner leads with in defense of his enterprise. Looking at the reviews for Fior d' Italia, it looks like service leaves quite a bit to be desired and the food isn't that good.

Maybe Yelp is polluted and biased...or maybe Fior d' Italia just sucks. Occam's razor says it's the latter.

My wife and I travel all over the country on business, often finding ourselves in cities where we've never been. Yelp finds us a great place to eat every single time.

cft• 14 years ago

I find that the star rating of places/reviews in Google maps in Android is more reliable. Presumably, it does not suffer from the extortion bias either.

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

When I want to find a good place to eat, first I 1. ask somebody where a good place is and what they liked that they ate 2. figure out what kind of food i want and look for the best rated places near me 3. compare the menu with what i know about the cuisine, pictures of the place and any details i can scrounge up 4. then I just go and try to pick something I think i'll like.

Food isn't rocket science. Good places are open for a while and have lots of people and you avoid chains and franchises. Don't complain about the service, nobody cares. Don't complain about the prices, nobody cares. Don't complain about the clientele or the ambiance, nobody cares. It's about the food, stupid.

matan_a• 14 years ago

This is my rule for Yelp:

1. Listen to bad reviews. 2. Ignore good reviews.

jadc• 14 years ago

Even though the article mentioned restaurants specifically, I believe the point about Yelp being fundamentally flawed extends much beyond food.

I have heard similar reports from doctors saying that Yelp is filtering out their 5 star reviews unless they advertise with them.

msg• 14 years ago

I found this response elsewhere in the thread so interesting that I had to say something.

PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :(

If you're trying to keep a taqueria to yourself, do you have incentive to leave a bad review? After all, your interests are not aligned with the rest of Yelp's customers. Or even, necessarily aligned with the taqueria's success. Maybe it's to your codependent advantage that they always stay small and delicious and hidden and yours...

preciouss.

This is the problem Yelp hasn't solved yet: how to align the interests of Yelp, Yelp reviewers, Yelp readers, and restaurants. Yelp succeeds if reviewers leave bad reviews because they are upselling bad review protection (they say they aren't several times in the FAQ, but they protesteth too much for me), or if restaurants buy ads. Yelp readers succeed if reviewers are honest and they can use reviews to optimize their personal quality/dollar equation. Restaurants succeed if Yelp drives Yelp readers to them, if reviewers leave good reviews.

Reviewers have many incentives to game reviews. One of the Yelp FAQs is about payola. If they review enough they gain community prominence through badges/titles. If they review too much, their reviews look suspicious (because they could be making them up instead of actually attending). If they become untrustworthy due to a secret Yelp algorithm, their reviews are obscured from prominent view. If they have a bad experience at a place everyone thinks is great, they run a risk writing a contrarian review and being labeled untrustworthy. And on and on.

cletus• 14 years ago

Yelp is fundamentally flawed.

Firstly, they have a clear conflict of interest, which has been discussed many times, when it comes to selling advertising. Buying advertising (anecdotally) seems to make bad reviews magically disappear.

Secondly, and this has always been the problem with "local", is you need a certain critical mass for it to be usable. You can argue that Yelp has reached this point in many cases (although see the next two points) but there are many businesses with <5 reviews.

Third, there is too much friction in asking people to review (and even rate things). Most people simply don't and probably never will. This exacerbates the "critical mass" problem but also introduces a selection bias. The people who comment and rate aren't necessarily representative of general opinions or you (the personalization problem).

I've gone to eat at some places in NYC that are 3.5+ stars that have varied from average to terrible. In some cases I've gone with someone who shared this positive review but--and I realize the counterargument to this is that it's subjective--they're just wrong.

Fourth, there is a clear fraud problem with reviews and ratings. People are clearly paid to give positive reviews (eg you see someone rate a given car dealership in the Bay area on one day and then another in Maine the next day and so on). Of any of the companies in "local", IMHO Google is in the best position to deal with this particular problem (disclaimer: I work for Google).

Lastly, as such reviews become increasingly important, there is the issue of extortion. If this hasn't happened already it will. Criminals already target websites with DDoS attacks that go away if the site in question pays what amounts to "protection money". There's nothing really to stop such criminal enterprises shaking down businesses with the threat of a bad slew of reviews.

It's worth making extra mention of personalization. Many (Google included) seem to view "social search" and "social recommendations" as some kind of panacea to some or even all of these problems. I disagree. I know a couple of people who, say, like Adam Sandler movies. I do not. Not even remotely. Their movie recommendations are so diametrically opposed to mine that I can pretty much take the opposite of what they recommend.

The way forward with this will be something like the Netflix model (IMHO) where these great data mining systems will attempt to find people who are like me and have similar tastes whose recommendations will likely coincide with mine.

nathanwdavis• 14 years ago

This does bode well for sites like AngiesList.com which charge a small membership fee (to end users), don't allow anonymous reviews, and allow businesses to respond publicly to individual review's. (I work for Angie's List)

Drbble• 14 years ago

My understanding was that vendors just pay the entry fee to game Angie List reviews.

pbreit3• 14 years ago

There's a lot of FUD in there (maybe a conflict of interest?). The media industry operates fine on an ad-based model. Yes, reports of disappearing reviews have only been anecdotal and never close to proven (and obviously unnecessary). People love to review things and there are tons of ways to incent such. It should be possible to manage fraudulent reviews as many other companies do (Google included)(Max and Jeremy also have a lot of experience there). The extortion thing is simply ridiculous. Yelp was originally much more "social grafty" and has stepped back significantly from that. I have little doubt it will continue to find ways to maximize review relevance aside from social graph.

prof_hobart• 14 years ago

Not sure what you mean by the media industry working fine on an ad-based model. If you mean it makes money then possibly it does, but if you mean that it typically manages to remain a trustworthy independent source of news/reviews etc, then I'd strongly suggest that it fails quite badly.

Advertisers threatening to pull their accounts because the publication/channel has done something they don't like is the most visible manifestation of this, but the modern newspaper industry is basically run at the behest of advertisers and the typical output of these papers (just look at the amount of PR-driven stories that make it into the average paper on a daily basis) largely reflects this.

dmoy• 14 years ago

Collaborative filtering would be cool, yes. However the situation for netflix is a bit different than restaurants. It's hard to get really good overlap with a large number of people for a lunch that exists only in one specific location, compared to a film which can be viewed anywhere in the world, at any time, by anyone (and then encouraged to review by their direct point of sale (Netflix)). Also the cost (mostly time) in generating a lot of reviews by a single person to establish any kind of baseline is much higher.

And, on top of that, it doesn't help the random anonymous user with 0 reviews submitted as much.

Someone should get on that though, because if you could solve the problem of how to set up proper recommendation systems for food, that'd be awesome.

Who knows, maybe Yelp as experimented with this? I don't know what kind of logged-in userbase they have though. Maybe if you had something integrated with the restaurants, where people could be logged in via their smartphones, and give a review to some NFC device at the restaurant. Lower the barrier of reviewing, encourage reviews right at the point of sale (similar to reviewing on netflix.com).

Someone must have already thought of this before though.

ed209• 14 years ago

Friction on posting a review is a huge problem. On the flip side, you ask any of your friends "where's a good place to eat tonight?" no doubt they'll have a few reviews in them and promptly let you know some places you should try.

I think this industry needs more of a q&a (quora type) approach where I can ask the same question that I would ask my friends. That way I'm only recommending places (take that as a 4+ star review) and not criticising businesses.

This benefits both customers by show places that have been recommended multiple times as an indicator of quality and business that don't suffer as a result of a bad night or rouge staff member.

This approach makes it easier to actually find what you too because by virtue of the way that place is suggested ("where is a good spot for breakfast?") we already get a ton of meta data.

jonnathanson3• 14 years ago

I believe there's room in the local space for a service that combines check-ins with reviews. In other words, only real people, who've physically been to a given restaurant, are able to review it. While you'd still suffer from selection-bias problems with this model, at least the self-selectors would be people with a propensity to try a lot of restaurants and review them -- not population-representative, perhaps, but at least dedicated to the task.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to game such a system. (You don't actually have to be at a restaurant to check into it, but you do need to be within a certain geographic radius -- so this would cut down on bogus or fraudulent reviews from people nowhere near the location). But those methods are harder to pull off, and they necessarily apply to a much smaller subset of potential gamers -- thereby making gaming a smaller-scale proposition.

Collaborative filtering would lend itself well to this model, too. Toss in some sort of karma system, as well, and you've got a check against system gaming and low-quality reviews.

JoachimSchipper• 14 years ago

Believing the device's idea of where it is isn't going to help against any kind of serious criminal (get root, hook API, profit; and what about people without smartphones, anyway?). Triangulating a phone via cell phone towers might work, but that opens a whole new can of worms: you need the carriers to cooperate; it's a privacy nightmare; conclusively linking a Yelp username to a physical SIM card is not easy; and so forth.

saucetenuto• 14 years ago

I've only used OpenTable twice, but it seems to be the start of what you're describing. It bills itself as a way to easily make restaurant reservations from your computer or mobile phone...but after you've been, they invite you to review the place.

I don't know if they see themselves as Yelp competitors, long-term, but I hope so.

rabbitonrails• 14 years ago

Queue the class action lawsuit.

agillentine• 14 years ago

"The way forward with this will be something like the Netflix model (IMHO) where these great data mining systems will attempt to find people who are like me and have similar tastes whose recommendations will likely coincide with mine."

My company Whit.li has built an api to do just that. We are launching this weekend at SXSW check it out at whit.li.

tmchow• 14 years ago

Shameless plug:

We just launched Chewsy (http://chewsy.com) last year after years of frustration with these aggregate business review sites. We're focused on rating what you ate and sharing recommendations with friends. It's similar to other food apps on the market but different in significant ways. For example, it's not like a vertical instagram like some of those other popular food apps.

We're very much in growth mode, but San Francisco is getting some good traction and our hometown of Seattle is thriving.

I encourage you to try it out and perhaps it can help you find your next best meal (and help you recommend something to your friends).

zephyrnh• 14 years ago

I think this makes sense. Filtered reviews are reviews that yelp considers to be fraudulent. They may be reviews created by multiple accounts from the same computer to inflate a restaurant's rating. Or they may all be negative reviews created by one person with multiple accounts to try to hurt a business they weren't happy with. Either way, I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a system of filtering should and does exist.

Now maybe their filtering system is so horrendous that it makes a 4-star restaurant seem like a 2.5 star restaurant, but I find this hard to believe.

As for asking people to advertise with them to make "bad reviews disappear", that would be terrible, so I can't speak to that, since all we have to go on is this particular owner's word vs Yelp's. Is there any proof of this happening?

bumbledraven• 14 years ago

Filtering legitimate reviews is a big problem. Once I discovered that Yelp filtered most of my reviews, I stopped writing them. It's not even like I'm some anonymous coward (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course): I have had a photo of myself on Yelp for a long time, my account is linked to a few friends of mine on Yelp, and I even went to a Yelp event. I wonder how many other people like me stopped writing reviews for the same reason?

RayJR• 14 years ago

I cannot believe the coincidence! My father owns a small pizza business (small as in 1 store, 22 years) and yesterday a yelp power user got upset because I didn't give her free jalepenos. She knew we charge extra for things like ranch but still expected jalepenos for free. She got so mad she changed her review and said there was a "hair" in her pizza "months ago." She is obviously saying this to damage us because she was treated the same as all customers and expects special treatment. Extortion? That's how it felt but I don't care because our true customers know better and are great people. See the whole thing here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine. Sort by date, most recent review.

This was yelps response when I reported this user: Hi there,

Thank you for inquiring about the reviews of Ray's Pizza on Yelp.

We've looked at Jayne L's review, and since it appears to reflect the personal experience and opinions of the reviewer, we are leaving it intact. Unfortunately, we don't take sides on factual disputes, and suggest instead that you contact the reviewer again to clarify any misunderstandings.

We think it's important for businesses to be part of the conversation, and have created a suite of free tools to help business owners get the most out of Yelp. It looks like you've already unlocked your business page. As a reminder, you can: - Communicate with your customers via private message or public comment - Track how many people view your business page - Add photos and a detailed description of your business - Convert Yelp users into customers by posting a Yelp Deal to your listing You can login to your account here: https://biz.yelp.com/

Regards, Summer Yelp User Support San Francisco, California

I am a yelp user and it was great but for businesses its getting out of hand when there is no transparency. What if people are paid to yelp a lot and then use their influence to sell reviews? It could happen.

dbcfd3• 14 years ago

Good luck getting a power user (or god forbid, a community moderator) review removed.

A number of them feel they deserve preferential treatment because of their Yelp status, and will go out of their way to bash you when that doesn't happen.

dbcfd3• 14 years ago

As a business owner, I have also seen the extortion for advertising model. Businesses that advertise with Yelp have low star reviews filtered, while businesses like mine that do not, have reviews from valid customers (often with friends and other reviews) filtered, to lower star ratings.

I have also seen reviews that are blatantly fake (e.g. reviews from Santa Claus, comical reviews, etc.) persist, until a significant amount of time passes. This indicates manual removal, and no actual Yelp filter.

micheljansen• 14 years ago

I first read about Yelp's extortion practices in 2009 [1]. I thought that now they have grown so big, the extortion would have stopped. Apparently not :(

[1] http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e...

A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

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