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Judge: There’s no proof Yelp manipulates reviews

109 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

hackaflocka 11y ago
I think the legal definition of "manipulation" might differ from the "ethical" definition. What I think has happened here is that the court didn't find any "illegal manipulation." The question of "unethical manipulation" may still be up in the air. The problem for Yelp is that it seems to serve as a psychological outlet for a large number of people. They're angry about something, it builds up, and they then take immense satisfaction in channeling it into a business review.
tacos 11y ago
Literally every local small business I know reports some type of shenanigans with Yelp. Some of it is surely false-correlation by emotional shop owners. But there is, at best, a critical mass of unethical salespeople, because I've heard far too many reports of pressured selling. Either way, they've got a really big problem. Big picture, it's hard to imagine how a site like this can remain neutral or useful long-term. It's just a playground for mischief on all sides, and eventually consumers will catch on.
- ahallock 11y ago
  What does a useful local business review site look like? Not being snarky--genuinely interested to see if there's an opportunity here.
  - lbotos 11y ago
    It's a great question. I think a lot of the problem is reviews get stale AND you don't know/trust the reviewer.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Yeah. I don't live in the boonies but I also don't live in a big city. Pretty much any restaurant or small business around where I live has, at best, a handful of reviews over the past few years. It's just not very useful. Biases baked into the platform are one problem for a review site. But you also just need critical mass.
  - CodeWriter23 11y ago
    Zagat?
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Zagat is (still) pretty decent if you're interested in restaurants in one of the metropolitan areas that it covers and you're in their foddie-ish demographic. However, I don't think Zagat, which had a pretty long pre-Web history in what we now call crowdsourced restaurant reviews, offers a lot of insight for how we might do a small business review site today.
      - CodeWriter23 11y ago
        The question didn't qualify "useful" as being crowdsourced or not. And that gets to my point, a review site that has its own reviewers is pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful. Otherwise the system will be gamed by vendetta seekers and the business itself. And I believe it is inevitable that a crowdsourced site will ultimately end up gaming the system to try to offset those effects.
        ghaff 11y ago
        >pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful IMO that's an overstatement. I find Zagat, Yelp, and Amazon reviews all useful--however imperfect. That said, however unpopular this opinion may be in our crowdsourced world, professional reviews/ratings tend to be more reliable than random ones on the Internet. The problem is that professional reviews don't scale, especially for local businesses. The New York Times restaurant reviews aren't bad but that's NYC and, even in that case, a lot of the reviews are going to be quite old. So, in an ideal world, there might be armies of professional evaluators of hotels, restaurants, and other businesses--but that's not the world that we live in. (Films are one of the few areas where you can get a pretty good pool of professional and semi-professional reviewers.)
        jacobr1 11y ago
        I think smart pay systems might help here. I'm not an avid reviewer - I just don't care enough for it to be worth my time. However, uber makes it part of the workflow. To get another ride I either need to make a rating or skip making a rating - so I make a rating. And it only takes one click. I suspect if Apple Pay or Google's equivalent had a similar process they would be able to generate some very sold scores for local businesses since they have both identify and proof of purchase.
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    I think the biggest things working against Yelp are the reports from businesses that Yelp offered to censor bad reviews and/or promote/shill positive reviews in exchange for money. I've heard about it all N-th hand, so I'd imagine that Yelp's team is very careful about wording it such that it's some sort of legit promotion that they're offering.
    - twoodfin 11y ago
      ...and yet, despite what must be hundreds of thousands of calls or emails made by Yelp sales folk to businesses, nobody, to my knowledge, has ever produced a voicemail, telephone recording, or message containing a promise or threat to do anything other than what Yelp publicly offers to its paying customers[1]. I'm actually sure this has happened, since it's essentially impossible to prevent thousands of salespeople from deviating from an approved script when pushing hard for a sale, but surely it can't be commonplace. [1] https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising
      - 1024core 11y ago
        Exactly. I made the same comment above before reading yours. I also find it hard to believe that after all these years, not ONE person has solid proof of shenanigans.
  - deepinsand 11y ago
    I think Yelp is missing proof of identity and proof of patronage. It was created before social media took off, and before you could reliably know if someone had been somewhere. I don't know if you need both, but proof of patronage alone might not be enough to trust a review (See Amazon verified purchases).
    - scarmig 11y ago
      Aren't Yelp "Check-ins" factored into the trustworthiness rating of a review, or whatever it's called? That's kind of an ersatz proof of patronage.
      - etjossem 11y ago
        Maybe. It still wouldn't be foolproof - after all, Yelp Check-ins are powered by an API that trusts the coordinates it receives. It might be possible to craft a request for that API. And even using a legitimate copy of the Yelp app to make requests, a jailbroken iPhone can change its coordinates to whatever you want. An Android doesn't even need that - just set it to developer mode and you're ready to fake check-ins all day.
    - tailgate 11y ago
      Would you ever trust an app that was linked to your identity and stored a list of places you visited? Be careful what you wish for.
      - rmxt 11y ago
        Is that much different than what Facebook or Google Maps are already doing behind the scenes? They might not make that data accessible to you, but it's undoubtedly being (or able to be) compiled behind the scenes. See this update: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you-when-local-businesses-are-busiest/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you... The average HN user might not care for such a system, but I think many people would find it reassuring for better or worse.
- lbotos 11y ago
  Fun Yelp story time: Dated a girl. Her father was an eye doctor in a small town. There were 2 eye doctors on main street. He was convinced the other doctor had someone leave a bad review (which out of his ~8 or so reviews) which made him a 2 star "offering". He was my eye doctor and I _did_ like his work, so we made an account, and left a review. My review was "untrusted" because my account didn't have any other activity. Now it became a game. Everywhere we went we'd leave a yelp review to try and get my account to be "trusted". This went on for about 3 months and we had about 10-15 reviews. My account was still untrusted. We decided to stop and just let it be. About 3 months after that, my user was trusted and he now has a 5 star rating. The woes of yelp in a small town.
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    I'm missing how this story reflects poorly on Yelp. You did exactly what they want Yelpers to do: Review a series of places so they can (after a few months, apparently) calibrate your ratings and have some algorithmic confidence you're not a drive-by or paid reviewer.
    - greeneggs 11y ago
      I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. The whole point of the exercise was for his girlfriend to write a review for her father's business. But it seems nearly impossible to stop people who are determined to write fake reviews. Yelp obviously isn't perfect, but what's the alternative?
      - VLM 11y ago
        "what's the alternative?" Live a post-online-review existence. That's where I'm at. The future is here just unevenly distributed. Take all the arguments people have against IQ as a measure of a person's meaning or value, turn them around and apply them to the number of online stars a company has purchased, err, uh, obtained via reviews from real customers LOL as if anyone believes that's really how it works. Or if you work for a big corporation you likely have extensive experience with people freaking out about utterly meaningless metrics... like number of online stars. Sucks to be an online review company, but if the providers hate the implied, rumored, or actual extortion racket, and the users find the data to be useless, when they go away, nothing of value will be lost.
- ghaff 11y ago
  There's always bias of various sorts though even if it's just the preferences of most of the people doing reviews. I liked Zagat in the pre-Google days, for example, because the demographic of the people willing to fill out a dead-tree mail-in survey about restaurants was probably pretty similar to me. (I still prefer Zagat to Yelp but it doesn't have as broad coverage.) For all its various biases, I find Yelp OK given some critical mass of reviews. And reading some reviews can be as useful as looking at the overall rating. It's not great but, in an area I don't know, it's better than throwing a dart at the wall.
- ssharp 11y ago
  There is a two-week span every couple months where a Yelp rep tries to contact me daily, sometimes even multiple times per day. I rarely take unsolicited calls since I tend to get a lot of them, so I'm not really sure what they want. What do they have to sell you on? The company I work for doesn't have a strong "untrusted" Yelp rating, but it's largely because it's not a local business and people predominantly give us bad reviews when something negative happens, even when it's outside of our control. There are better review sites in the niche we operate in and there are no parallels between those reviews and what ends up on Yelp. You get some of the same complaints, but there are also far more positive reviews and the reviews are higher quality and more informative than what's on Yelp. For trusted reviews on Yelp, we rate much better.
  - tacos 11y ago
    They sell ads, including those that show up on your competitor's business page.
orthoganol 11y ago
Yelp is all but meaningless in San Francisco, probably its most popular city. Really average or even crappy cafes, salons, restaurants have greater than or equal 4 star ratings... it's a little baffling. I presume from the stories you hear that it's because the businesses pay.
- crikli 11y ago
  This may be the case in San Francisco. It's not the case elsewhere, however, at least for this anecdotal sample size of one. :) Business travel takes me all over the country and Yelp is incredibly reliable. I've lost track of the number of times that someone recommends a place, Yelp says it's a 2-3 star place, we go anyway, and yup, it's average at best. I hear and see the complaints of restauranteurs about Yelp. Yet my experiences at places usually match what's seen in reviews. There's a restaurant in my hometown where the owner, a friend of mine, constantly complained about Yelp reviews where the the sentiment was that his food was too expensive and not of consistent quality (I agreed with the reviews). A few weeks ago he decided to close the place because of declining revenues. Had he listened to the reviews, settled for a bit less margin, and worked with his staff to produce a consistent product he'd still be in business. Edit: I neglected to add that it's really important to read reviews for context. Sometimes you just have people bitching because they're a gluten-sensitive nut-allergic vegan and the place didn't cater to their highly specific needs.
  - zippergz 11y ago
    I too travel all around the country for business, and I find Yelp to be less than helpful. I agree with you that reading the reviews for context is critical. In fact, that's the only way to really get a read on a place. But with hundreds of restaurants to choose from, and hundreds of reviews each (if there are only a handful of reviews, you can't rely on them at all), it's incredibly time consuming to go through them. I find that the star ratings are pretty much worthless. They get dragged down by people who ding fine dining restaurants for not having Olive Garden prices, and others who mark down local greasy spoons for not having French Laundry service. I don't care how the diner compares to the French Laundry. I care how it compares to other diners. A single rating scale across all types of restaurants is probably counterproductive, but the problem is greatly magnified by throngs of clueless reviewers who have bogus expectations and are rating places based on them.
kin 11y ago
Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale. I've experienced first hand being the point of communication for my parents' small business. As soon as I declined a $300/month offer, my parents' business (which had only 2 5 star reviews) suddenly received a 1 star review from some random person that didn't even fit the store's clientele. Where did this review come from? I understand the benefit Yelp provides to some excellent establishments but it unjustly hurts so many along the way.
- spooningtamarin 11y ago
  Yelp will perish, because, unfortunately, the moral quality of the individuals isn't high and the founders/CEO seem to be blind to it. As much as you need to be a very good business man to build a business that Yelp is, you need to surround yourself with good people, and recently, plenty of good people have left Yelp, and realistically, there aren't many out there.
  - talmand 11y ago
    I think this type of thing will be the eventual death of most social media type enterprises. People just don't realize it's hard to maintain and curate such things, worse if it gets popular. It's especially difficult when so many people just don't understand how the internet works and believe every trollish thing they read on it.
- kaonashi 11y ago
  > Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale Sure they do, it's just too convenient to look the other way and maintain deniability.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale. This phone call may be recorded for training or quality control purposes.
jakewalker 11y ago
The standards for adequately pleading a securities fraud lawsuit -- which this was -- are incredibly high, and the plaintiff has to meet that standard without access to any discovery from the Defendant (here, Yelp). Which is all a way of saying that it is extremely difficult to read too much into the dismissal of a securities fraud lawsuit. The judge in this case was basically concluding that plaintiff -- a Yelp investor -- could not adequately allege in his complaint that Yelp or its executives made a false statement of material fact in connection with the sale of a security. And plaintiff had an extremely high burden to survive such a motion to dismiss because of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Securities_Litigation_Reform_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Securities_Litigation_...). So, in short, there is very little that one can conclude about Yelp's actual practices (for better or for worse) from learning that a securities lawsuit like this was dismissed.
stingrae 11y ago
I have a small anecdotal experience with yelp manipulations. In my case as a user trying to search for a restaurants reviews by the exact name of the place. The search resulted in a competing restaurant blocks away of the same ethnicity that happens to pay for yelp advertising. This is pretty poor practice. The only way to find the restaurant I was actually looking for was with the map view. If the excuse is poor search quality, it seems too convenient.
free2rhyme214 11y ago
Yelp doesn't manipulate reviews, their sales people tell you they'll remove bad reviews if you pay them money. It's easy to behave this way when you're a monopoly.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  What are they a monopoly in, millenial-targeted web reviews for specific industries? "Monopoly" is not synonymous with "successful."
  - free2rhyme214 11y ago
    They're a monopoly in local reviews, a modern day Yellow Pages. They had $377mm in 2014 revenue. Their biggest competitor is Angie's List who's now facing competition from Thumbtack.
  - free2rhyme214 11y ago
    Why isn't a monopoly synonymous with successful?
- criddell 11y ago
  > their sales people tell you they'll remove bad reviews if you pay them money Has this ever been substantiated? It seems like it would be a pretty easy thing to document.
  - free2rhyme214 11y ago
    I'm not sure. You'd have to record your calls before they call you.
    - in_cahoots 11y ago
      Or you could just take a screenshot while you're on the phone, and then another one a week or two later. If the difference is as large as the reports make it seem this should be easy to detect.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
Yelp talks about not changing reviews or deleting bad reviews. What obviously DOES happen is that they sort reviews differently and make the bad ones hard to find. Then they come out and say 'we don't delete reviews, we don't manipulate them' but it's easy to find companies that have reviews sorted so that the negative ones are buried and on a completely separate page from the main reviews.
- krisdol 11y ago
  What you need is evidence to show that the way this affects companies differs based on whether the company is paying Yelp for advertising. There are so many reasons why either positive OR negative reviews may be filtered. I've seen false review vote-brigades on a business because someone from the business made offensive remarks about palestine and the military.
TACIXAT 11y ago
My Yelp story: I was a pretty active user. I enjoyed writing funny reviews of crappy places. One day I was trying to look something up and got a pop-over to confirm my account info. I clicked through and went on with my day. A few weeks later I received notice that my account was deleted. I contacted them and was informed I was too young to use the site and there was no chance of account recovery (I was a few years over 18 at the time). All of my reviews were gone. Emailed them, no chance of getting those back, though I was welcome to create a new account. So, they managed to disappear all the reviews I left. They did it on a technicality and it was well within their terms of service. However, I view this as vote manipulation. They're pushing really hard now to say they don't do that. They burned me once though and now I actively avoid the service.
anthonybsd 11y ago
We've witnessed this manipulation first hand. My son used to go to the local day care that had stellar reviews on Yelp - 4 or 5 stars with a single 3 star review. I knew the vast majority of reviewers because they were parents whom I've met through kids birthday parties and the like. Then one day Yelp called the owner of the daycare asking her if she'd like to purchase some advertising. She already had plenty of business so she politely declined. A week later 20-something reviews went into "Not Recommended" category, effectively becoming hidden. The only review that remained on the site for the business was the single 3-star review. This is effectively extortion. In other words yelp won't fabricate reviews, it'll just selectively filter reviews if you don't pay them to pain a worse picture of your business.
Steko 11y ago
Used to love yelp but not letting me use the site on mobile browser is an absolute deal-killer. Apple should disapprove any app where the websites functionality is intentionally broken on iOS in order to force users into the app.
- 55555 11y ago
  pinterest too. hate this
  - codecamper 11y ago
    maybe it's just a way to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done. What the heck is wrong with downloading an app?
    - function_seven 11y ago
      I don't have the space on my phone for every website that wants to be an app. The great thing about the WWW is that information can be accessed without having to install a special program for each provider. The web browser is plenty capable of handling Yelp's needs. It might be to reduce the amount of work, but I still don't like it, and would rather they let me use my already-existing web browser to access their web site.

109 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

I think the legal definition of "manipulation" might differ from the "ethical" definition. What I think has happened here is that the court didn't find any "illegal manipulation." The question of "unethical manipulation" may still be up in the air. The problem for Yelp is that it seems to serve as a psychological outlet for a large number of people. They're angry about something, it builds up, and they then take immense satisfaction in channeling it into a business review.

tacos 11y ago

Literally every local small business I know reports some type of shenanigans with Yelp. Some of it is surely false-correlation by emotional shop owners. But there is, at best, a critical mass of unethical salespeople, because I've heard far too many reports of pressured selling. Either way, they've got a really big problem. Big picture, it's hard to imagine how a site like this can remain neutral or useful long-term. It's just a playground for mischief on all sides, and eventually consumers will catch on.

ahallock 11y ago
What does a useful local business review site look like? Not being snarky--genuinely interested to see if there's an opportunity here.
- lbotos 11y ago
  It's a great question. I think a lot of the problem is reviews get stale AND you don't know/trust the reviewer.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Yeah. I don't live in the boonies but I also don't live in a big city. Pretty much any restaurant or small business around where I live has, at best, a handful of reviews over the past few years. It's just not very useful. Biases baked into the platform are one problem for a review site. But you also just need critical mass.
- CodeWriter23 11y ago
  Zagat?
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Zagat is (still) pretty decent if you're interested in restaurants in one of the metropolitan areas that it covers and you're in their foddie-ish demographic. However, I don't think Zagat, which had a pretty long pre-Web history in what we now call crowdsourced restaurant reviews, offers a lot of insight for how we might do a small business review site today.
    - CodeWriter23 11y ago
      The question didn't qualify "useful" as being crowdsourced or not. And that gets to my point, a review site that has its own reviewers is pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful. Otherwise the system will be gamed by vendetta seekers and the business itself. And I believe it is inevitable that a crowdsourced site will ultimately end up gaming the system to try to offset those effects.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        >pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful IMO that's an overstatement. I find Zagat, Yelp, and Amazon reviews all useful--however imperfect. That said, however unpopular this opinion may be in our crowdsourced world, professional reviews/ratings tend to be more reliable than random ones on the Internet. The problem is that professional reviews don't scale, especially for local businesses. The New York Times restaurant reviews aren't bad but that's NYC and, even in that case, a lot of the reviews are going to be quite old. So, in an ideal world, there might be armies of professional evaluators of hotels, restaurants, and other businesses--but that's not the world that we live in. (Films are one of the few areas where you can get a pretty good pool of professional and semi-professional reviewers.)
        jacobr1 11y ago
        I think smart pay systems might help here. I'm not an avid reviewer - I just don't care enough for it to be worth my time. However, uber makes it part of the workflow. To get another ride I either need to make a rating or skip making a rating - so I make a rating. And it only takes one click. I suspect if Apple Pay or Google's equivalent had a similar process they would be able to generate some very sold scores for local businesses since they have both identify and proof of purchase.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  I think the biggest things working against Yelp are the reports from businesses that Yelp offered to censor bad reviews and/or promote/shill positive reviews in exchange for money. I've heard about it all N-th hand, so I'd imagine that Yelp's team is very careful about wording it such that it's some sort of legit promotion that they're offering.
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    ...and yet, despite what must be hundreds of thousands of calls or emails made by Yelp sales folk to businesses, nobody, to my knowledge, has ever produced a voicemail, telephone recording, or message containing a promise or threat to do anything other than what Yelp publicly offers to its paying customers[1]. I'm actually sure this has happened, since it's essentially impossible to prevent thousands of salespeople from deviating from an approved script when pushing hard for a sale, but surely it can't be commonplace. [1] https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising
    - 1024core 11y ago
      Exactly. I made the same comment above before reading yours. I also find it hard to believe that after all these years, not ONE person has solid proof of shenanigans.
- deepinsand 11y ago
  I think Yelp is missing proof of identity and proof of patronage. It was created before social media took off, and before you could reliably know if someone had been somewhere. I don't know if you need both, but proof of patronage alone might not be enough to trust a review (See Amazon verified purchases).
  - scarmig 11y ago
    Aren't Yelp "Check-ins" factored into the trustworthiness rating of a review, or whatever it's called? That's kind of an ersatz proof of patronage.
    - etjossem 11y ago
      Maybe. It still wouldn't be foolproof - after all, Yelp Check-ins are powered by an API that trusts the coordinates it receives. It might be possible to craft a request for that API. And even using a legitimate copy of the Yelp app to make requests, a jailbroken iPhone can change its coordinates to whatever you want. An Android doesn't even need that - just set it to developer mode and you're ready to fake check-ins all day.
  - tailgate 11y ago
    Would you ever trust an app that was linked to your identity and stored a list of places you visited? Be careful what you wish for.
    - rmxt 11y ago
      Is that much different than what Facebook or Google Maps are already doing behind the scenes? They might not make that data accessible to you, but it's undoubtedly being (or able to be) compiled behind the scenes. See this update: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you-when-local-businesses-are-busiest/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you... The average HN user might not care for such a system, but I think many people would find it reassuring for better or worse.
lbotos 11y ago
Fun Yelp story time: Dated a girl. Her father was an eye doctor in a small town. There were 2 eye doctors on main street. He was convinced the other doctor had someone leave a bad review (which out of his ~8 or so reviews) which made him a 2 star "offering". He was my eye doctor and I _did_ like his work, so we made an account, and left a review. My review was "untrusted" because my account didn't have any other activity. Now it became a game. Everywhere we went we'd leave a yelp review to try and get my account to be "trusted". This went on for about 3 months and we had about 10-15 reviews. My account was still untrusted. We decided to stop and just let it be. About 3 months after that, my user was trusted and he now has a 5 star rating. The woes of yelp in a small town.
- twoodfin 11y ago
  I'm missing how this story reflects poorly on Yelp. You did exactly what they want Yelpers to do: Review a series of places so they can (after a few months, apparently) calibrate your ratings and have some algorithmic confidence you're not a drive-by or paid reviewer.
  - greeneggs 11y ago
    I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. The whole point of the exercise was for his girlfriend to write a review for her father's business. But it seems nearly impossible to stop people who are determined to write fake reviews. Yelp obviously isn't perfect, but what's the alternative?
    - VLM 11y ago
      "what's the alternative?" Live a post-online-review existence. That's where I'm at. The future is here just unevenly distributed. Take all the arguments people have against IQ as a measure of a person's meaning or value, turn them around and apply them to the number of online stars a company has purchased, err, uh, obtained via reviews from real customers LOL as if anyone believes that's really how it works. Or if you work for a big corporation you likely have extensive experience with people freaking out about utterly meaningless metrics... like number of online stars. Sucks to be an online review company, but if the providers hate the implied, rumored, or actual extortion racket, and the users find the data to be useless, when they go away, nothing of value will be lost.
ghaff 11y ago
There's always bias of various sorts though even if it's just the preferences of most of the people doing reviews. I liked Zagat in the pre-Google days, for example, because the demographic of the people willing to fill out a dead-tree mail-in survey about restaurants was probably pretty similar to me. (I still prefer Zagat to Yelp but it doesn't have as broad coverage.) For all its various biases, I find Yelp OK given some critical mass of reviews. And reading some reviews can be as useful as looking at the overall rating. It's not great but, in an area I don't know, it's better than throwing a dart at the wall.
ssharp 11y ago
There is a two-week span every couple months where a Yelp rep tries to contact me daily, sometimes even multiple times per day. I rarely take unsolicited calls since I tend to get a lot of them, so I'm not really sure what they want. What do they have to sell you on? The company I work for doesn't have a strong "untrusted" Yelp rating, but it's largely because it's not a local business and people predominantly give us bad reviews when something negative happens, even when it's outside of our control. There are better review sites in the niche we operate in and there are no parallels between those reviews and what ends up on Yelp. You get some of the same complaints, but there are also far more positive reviews and the reviews are higher quality and more informative than what's on Yelp. For trusted reviews on Yelp, we rate much better.
- tacos 11y ago
  They sell ads, including those that show up on your competitor's business page.

orthoganol 11y ago

Yelp is all but meaningless in San Francisco, probably its most popular city. Really average or even crappy cafes, salons, restaurants have greater than or equal 4 star ratings... it's a little baffling. I presume from the stories you hear that it's because the businesses pay.

crikli 11y ago
This may be the case in San Francisco. It's not the case elsewhere, however, at least for this anecdotal sample size of one. :) Business travel takes me all over the country and Yelp is incredibly reliable. I've lost track of the number of times that someone recommends a place, Yelp says it's a 2-3 star place, we go anyway, and yup, it's average at best. I hear and see the complaints of restauranteurs about Yelp. Yet my experiences at places usually match what's seen in reviews. There's a restaurant in my hometown where the owner, a friend of mine, constantly complained about Yelp reviews where the the sentiment was that his food was too expensive and not of consistent quality (I agreed with the reviews). A few weeks ago he decided to close the place because of declining revenues. Had he listened to the reviews, settled for a bit less margin, and worked with his staff to produce a consistent product he'd still be in business. Edit: I neglected to add that it's really important to read reviews for context. Sometimes you just have people bitching because they're a gluten-sensitive nut-allergic vegan and the place didn't cater to their highly specific needs.
- zippergz 11y ago
  I too travel all around the country for business, and I find Yelp to be less than helpful. I agree with you that reading the reviews for context is critical. In fact, that's the only way to really get a read on a place. But with hundreds of restaurants to choose from, and hundreds of reviews each (if there are only a handful of reviews, you can't rely on them at all), it's incredibly time consuming to go through them. I find that the star ratings are pretty much worthless. They get dragged down by people who ding fine dining restaurants for not having Olive Garden prices, and others who mark down local greasy spoons for not having French Laundry service. I don't care how the diner compares to the French Laundry. I care how it compares to other diners. A single rating scale across all types of restaurants is probably counterproductive, but the problem is greatly magnified by throngs of clueless reviewers who have bogus expectations and are rating places based on them.

kin 11y ago

Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale. I've experienced first hand being the point of communication for my parents' small business. As soon as I declined a $300/month offer, my parents' business (which had only 2 5 star reviews) suddenly received a 1 star review from some random person that didn't even fit the store's clientele. Where did this review come from? I understand the benefit Yelp provides to some excellent establishments but it unjustly hurts so many along the way.

spooningtamarin 11y ago
Yelp will perish, because, unfortunately, the moral quality of the individuals isn't high and the founders/CEO seem to be blind to it. As much as you need to be a very good business man to build a business that Yelp is, you need to surround yourself with good people, and recently, plenty of good people have left Yelp, and realistically, there aren't many out there.
- talmand 11y ago
  I think this type of thing will be the eventual death of most social media type enterprises. People just don't realize it's hard to maintain and curate such things, worse if it gets popular. It's especially difficult when so many people just don't understand how the internet works and believe every trollish thing they read on it.
kaonashi 11y ago
> Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale Sure they do, it's just too convenient to look the other way and maintain deniability.
jacquesm 11y ago
> Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale. This phone call may be recorded for training or quality control purposes.

jakewalker 11y ago

The standards for adequately pleading a securities fraud lawsuit -- which this was -- are incredibly high, and the plaintiff has to meet that standard without access to any discovery from the Defendant (here, Yelp). Which is all a way of saying that it is extremely difficult to read too much into the dismissal of a securities fraud lawsuit. The judge in this case was basically concluding that plaintiff -- a Yelp investor -- could not adequately allege in his complaint that Yelp or its executives made a false statement of material fact in connection with the sale of a security. And plaintiff had an extremely high burden to survive such a motion to dismiss because of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Securities_Litigation_Reform_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Securities_Litigation_...). So, in short, there is very little that one can conclude about Yelp's actual practices (for better or for worse) from learning that a securities lawsuit like this was dismissed.

stingrae 11y ago

I have a small anecdotal experience with yelp manipulations. In my case as a user trying to search for a restaurants reviews by the exact name of the place. The search resulted in a competing restaurant blocks away of the same ethnicity that happens to pay for yelp advertising. This is pretty poor practice. The only way to find the restaurant I was actually looking for was with the map view. If the excuse is poor search quality, it seems too convenient.

free2rhyme214 11y ago

Yelp doesn't manipulate reviews, their sales people tell you they'll remove bad reviews if you pay them money. It's easy to behave this way when you're a monopoly.

oldmanjay 11y ago
What are they a monopoly in, millenial-targeted web reviews for specific industries? "Monopoly" is not synonymous with "successful."
- free2rhyme214 11y ago
  They're a monopoly in local reviews, a modern day Yellow Pages. They had $377mm in 2014 revenue. Their biggest competitor is Angie's List who's now facing competition from Thumbtack.
- free2rhyme214 11y ago
  Why isn't a monopoly synonymous with successful?
criddell 11y ago
> their sales people tell you they'll remove bad reviews if you pay them money Has this ever been substantiated? It seems like it would be a pretty easy thing to document.
- free2rhyme214 11y ago
  I'm not sure. You'd have to record your calls before they call you.
  - in_cahoots 11y ago
    Or you could just take a screenshot while you're on the phone, and then another one a week or two later. If the difference is as large as the reports make it seem this should be easy to detect.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

Yelp talks about not changing reviews or deleting bad reviews. What obviously DOES happen is that they sort reviews differently and make the bad ones hard to find. Then they come out and say 'we don't delete reviews, we don't manipulate them' but it's easy to find companies that have reviews sorted so that the negative ones are buried and on a completely separate page from the main reviews.

krisdol 11y ago
What you need is evidence to show that the way this affects companies differs based on whether the company is paying Yelp for advertising. There are so many reasons why either positive OR negative reviews may be filtered. I've seen false review vote-brigades on a business because someone from the business made offensive remarks about palestine and the military.

TACIXAT 11y ago

My Yelp story: I was a pretty active user. I enjoyed writing funny reviews of crappy places. One day I was trying to look something up and got a pop-over to confirm my account info. I clicked through and went on with my day. A few weeks later I received notice that my account was deleted. I contacted them and was informed I was too young to use the site and there was no chance of account recovery (I was a few years over 18 at the time). All of my reviews were gone. Emailed them, no chance of getting those back, though I was welcome to create a new account. So, they managed to disappear all the reviews I left. They did it on a technicality and it was well within their terms of service. However, I view this as vote manipulation. They're pushing really hard now to say they don't do that. They burned me once though and now I actively avoid the service.

anthonybsd 11y ago

We've witnessed this manipulation first hand. My son used to go to the local day care that had stellar reviews on Yelp - 4 or 5 stars with a single 3 star review. I knew the vast majority of reviewers because they were parents whom I've met through kids birthday parties and the like. Then one day Yelp called the owner of the daycare asking her if she'd like to purchase some advertising. She already had plenty of business so she politely declined. A week later 20-something reviews went into "Not Recommended" category, effectively becoming hidden. The only review that remained on the site for the business was the single 3-star review. This is effectively extortion. In other words yelp won't fabricate reviews, it'll just selectively filter reviews if you don't pay them to pain a worse picture of your business.

Steko 11y ago

Used to love yelp but not letting me use the site on mobile browser is an absolute deal-killer. Apple should disapprove any app where the websites functionality is intentionally broken on iOS in order to force users into the app.

55555 11y ago
pinterest too. hate this
- codecamper 11y ago
  maybe it's just a way to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done. What the heck is wrong with downloading an app?
  - function_seven 11y ago
    I don't have the space on my phone for every website that wants to be an app. The great thing about the WWW is that information can be accessed without having to install a special program for each provider. The web browser is plenty capable of handling Yelp's needs. It might be to reduce the amount of work, but I still don't like it, and would rather they let me use my already-existing web browser to access their web site.