5 ms·

User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have been gamed. I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back in favor of yellow

by atonse 7y ago

User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have been gamed. I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back in favor of yellow pages like curation. And higher paid listings. I already don't trust sites like Yelp and Angie's List, and instead go to places like Consumers' Checkbook to look for local vendors. There's something to be said for the quality of data curation and not user-generated data.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Hopefully. I'd happily pay someone for curated listings and reviews (we don't seem to have something like Consumer Reports over in the EU; at least I don't know of anything). Everything that's not either a recommendation from a person you know or community forums around a particular niche seems to be thoroughly gamed.
- blub 7y ago
  There's the Stiftung Warentest in Germany (test.de).
- rwmj 7y ago
  Which? magazine in the UK.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  There's nothing EU-wide, but many countries have their own versions. In Sweden there's "Råd & Rön" which was previously published by the government consumer advocacy agency and now by an independent Consumer's Association. See this link for a list of EU national organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Consumer_Organisation#Members https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Consumer_Organisa...
- specialist 7y ago
  Juicing engagement necessarily comes at the expense of trustworthiness. (I initially inadvertently typoed "truthworthiness", which I think is more apt.)
Traster 7y ago
The problem is that a tech company like Google is incredibly valuable for a simple reason- their marginal cost is ~$0. They have a fixed cost to run the service, relatively tiny marginal costs and massively higher marginal revenue so it scales fantastically. If you want a curated recommendation site then your marginal cost is going to be high - every geographic location you want to be in you're going to need to find every single business and invest significant time to investigate them. That time investigating all the coffee shops in Boston isn't going to help you win customers in Minnesota. That's a perfectly fine business, but it's not going to scale well and when you do finally review every coffee shop in Minnesota, Google is going to crawl all the data on your website and stick a card on its search results with all the information killing your site overnight. This has happened before. Because the high-value method doesn't have a nice business model, the companies that attempt it all either die due to being ripped off, being unable to scale, or get seduced by the easy growth of automated & user-generated content.
- rocqua 7y ago
  The scaling is when you are big enough that businesses want to be listed on your site. Then, rather than letting them put up whatever, you start curating submissions. If you can break the maps moat of 'everyone uses it' then it doesn't matter if the marginals of maps are better, because people won't use the inferior product.
0815test 7y ago
> User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have been gamed. Is OSM equally bad? There's many ways to run a "user-fed" project.
- phicoh 7y ago
  OSM has a community in most places. Nobody really cares about google.
  - RegW 7y ago
    A few years ago some idiot marked up pretty much every walk way in my town as a cycle way. As a keen cyclist who lives in a town with a somewhat poor provision for cycling, this is somewhat irritating as it makes our local government look like it is doing well. I followed the feedback link and reported a whole heap of these, including links to Streetview showing the "No Cycling" signs in some places. I got automated replies to say that someone would deal with my report - but nothing happended. They are all still showing up. Perhaps even Google doesn't care about Google.
- girzel 7y ago
  OSM isn't, but I suspect it's mostly because it's not high profile enough (the old "nobody bothers writing viruses for Linux" problem). If it were, I'm sure we'd see junk data. OSM's data is version controlled in some way, so I'd assume it could be rolled back, but that sounds labor-intensive. I use OSMand instead of Google Maps, and love it, except for the absolutely atrocious address parsing when searching. There's also a general lack of street numbers in my area (Pacific NW USA), which can make things difficult. Amusingly, it also suffers from the "won't show you street name labels" problem that other posters are accusing Google Maps of.
  - Moru 7y ago
    Using the app Streetcomplete, it's really easy to correct OSM data like street numbers and opening times around you as you walk.
0xffff2 7y ago
Were the Yellow Pages ever actually curated? It's been a very long time now, but back in high school I did some freelance computer repair work by making up a business name and putting it in the Yellow Pages with my cell phone number. As far as I can recall, there was no validation of anything other than that the check I wrote them was good.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That’s validation in of itself. Google does this with Chrome Apps — you pay $5 to publish.
- toast0 7y ago
  The curation for yellow pages was more indirect than anything. A) your check cleared B) you managed to work with the yellow pages company to get your ad right C) you managed to keep your phone number operating between the time you placed the ad, and the time I opened the book to use it -- probably at least a couple of months for layout and printing, plus the up to a year before the next printing.
alwaysknow 7y ago
Just curious - what's wrong with Angie's List? It seems a little harder to create an account (they actually did a small background check on me and called me on the phone to ask some questions when I signed up - it was kind of creepy), so it seems to cut down on the random postings from paid post farms and fake reviews you get on places like Amazon, Yelp, etc.
- atonse 7y ago
  Like Yelp, Angie's List businesses can pay for more prominent placement, and AL uses dark UI patterns to make it seem like they're somehow more legitimate than other reviewers, when in fact they just got there due to paying more. Same with Yelp. One of the worst experiences I've ever had with a contractor was with an electrician who had 117 A+ reviews on Angie's List (K&K Electric of Rockville, MD). They took 7 hours to complete a 1.5 hour job (installing a 40 foot cable run for a car charger), then threatened to put a lien on my house because I wanted to pay less as a result of the experience. It was a total shouting match (full disclosure: part of the tension was that I had to pay them 40 days later since I was out of the country for 4 weeks). On top of all that, the permit was rejected because they didn't properly label the high voltage, high amp breakers. Now I realize they probably paid for those "117 A+" reviews.
president 7y ago
I wonder if China has a social credit score API that companies can integrate to prevent sign-ups from known bad actors. Would be an interesting concept.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  ReCAPTCHA v3?
everybodyknows 7y ago
There's lots of great info on Yelp and Google reviews, if you know how to filter it. Two distinct filters are required, actually, one for the corrupt, and another for the clueless. Corrupt reviewer are the fake business locations, paid shills, employees, relatives, customers trading a 5-star review for a 10% discount. Smoke these out with the following tells. Review history: absent or all 5-star. Text content: description of service absent or generic description of service, zero negative or neutral specifics, hyperbolic declarations of loyalty. Clueless reviewers leave easier tells, but can be more plentiful. Review history is bipolar, all single- or five-star. Text content shows misunderstanding of what the vendor actually does, expressed with many errors of grammar, and irrelevant detail. May be excessively negative, due to unreasonable expectations of the vendor. So, reading a good sample of reviewer's text is required. This does consume a few more minutes of your day.

by atonse 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Hopefully. I'd happily pay someone for curated listings and reviews (we don't seem to have something like Consumer Reports over in the EU; at least I don't know of anything). Everything that's not either a recommendation from a person you know or community forums around a particular niche seems to be thoroughly gamed.

blub 7y ago
There's the Stiftung Warentest in Germany (test.de).
rwmj 7y ago
Which? magazine in the UK.
kalleboo 7y ago
There's nothing EU-wide, but many countries have their own versions. In Sweden there's "Råd & Rön" which was previously published by the government consumer advocacy agency and now by an independent Consumer's Association. See this link for a list of EU national organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Consumer_Organisation#Members https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Consumer_Organisa...
specialist 7y ago
Juicing engagement necessarily comes at the expense of trustworthiness. (I initially inadvertently typoed "truthworthiness", which I think is more apt.)

Traster 7y ago

The problem is that a tech company like Google is incredibly valuable for a simple reason- their marginal cost is ~$0. They have a fixed cost to run the service, relatively tiny marginal costs and massively higher marginal revenue so it scales fantastically. If you want a curated recommendation site then your marginal cost is going to be high - every geographic location you want to be in you're going to need to find every single business and invest significant time to investigate them. That time investigating all the coffee shops in Boston isn't going to help you win customers in Minnesota. That's a perfectly fine business, but it's not going to scale well and when you do finally review every coffee shop in Minnesota, Google is going to crawl all the data on your website and stick a card on its search results with all the information killing your site overnight. This has happened before. Because the high-value method doesn't have a nice business model, the companies that attempt it all either die due to being ripped off, being unable to scale, or get seduced by the easy growth of automated & user-generated content.

rocqua 7y ago
The scaling is when you are big enough that businesses want to be listed on your site. Then, rather than letting them put up whatever, you start curating submissions. If you can break the maps moat of 'everyone uses it' then it doesn't matter if the marginals of maps are better, because people won't use the inferior product.

0815test 7y ago

> User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have been gamed. Is OSM equally bad? There's many ways to run a "user-fed" project.

phicoh 7y ago
OSM has a community in most places. Nobody really cares about google.
- RegW 7y ago
  A few years ago some idiot marked up pretty much every walk way in my town as a cycle way. As a keen cyclist who lives in a town with a somewhat poor provision for cycling, this is somewhat irritating as it makes our local government look like it is doing well. I followed the feedback link and reported a whole heap of these, including links to Streetview showing the "No Cycling" signs in some places. I got automated replies to say that someone would deal with my report - but nothing happended. They are all still showing up. Perhaps even Google doesn't care about Google.
girzel 7y ago
OSM isn't, but I suspect it's mostly because it's not high profile enough (the old "nobody bothers writing viruses for Linux" problem). If it were, I'm sure we'd see junk data. OSM's data is version controlled in some way, so I'd assume it could be rolled back, but that sounds labor-intensive. I use OSMand instead of Google Maps, and love it, except for the absolutely atrocious address parsing when searching. There's also a general lack of street numbers in my area (Pacific NW USA), which can make things difficult. Amusingly, it also suffers from the "won't show you street name labels" problem that other posters are accusing Google Maps of.
- Moru 7y ago
  Using the app Streetcomplete, it's really easy to correct OSM data like street numbers and opening times around you as you walk.

0xffff2 7y ago

Were the Yellow Pages ever actually curated? It's been a very long time now, but back in high school I did some freelance computer repair work by making up a business name and putting it in the Yellow Pages with my cell phone number. As far as I can recall, there was no validation of anything other than that the check I wrote them was good.

Spooky23 7y ago
That’s validation in of itself. Google does this with Chrome Apps — you pay $5 to publish.
toast0 7y ago
The curation for yellow pages was more indirect than anything. A) your check cleared B) you managed to work with the yellow pages company to get your ad right C) you managed to keep your phone number operating between the time you placed the ad, and the time I opened the book to use it -- probably at least a couple of months for layout and printing, plus the up to a year before the next printing.

alwaysknow 7y ago

Just curious - what's wrong with Angie's List? It seems a little harder to create an account (they actually did a small background check on me and called me on the phone to ask some questions when I signed up - it was kind of creepy), so it seems to cut down on the random postings from paid post farms and fake reviews you get on places like Amazon, Yelp, etc.

atonse 7y ago
Like Yelp, Angie's List businesses can pay for more prominent placement, and AL uses dark UI patterns to make it seem like they're somehow more legitimate than other reviewers, when in fact they just got there due to paying more. Same with Yelp. One of the worst experiences I've ever had with a contractor was with an electrician who had 117 A+ reviews on Angie's List (K&K Electric of Rockville, MD). They took 7 hours to complete a 1.5 hour job (installing a 40 foot cable run for a car charger), then threatened to put a lien on my house because I wanted to pay less as a result of the experience. It was a total shouting match (full disclosure: part of the tension was that I had to pay them 40 days later since I was out of the country for 4 weeks). On top of all that, the permit was rejected because they didn't properly label the high voltage, high amp breakers. Now I realize they probably paid for those "117 A+" reviews.

president 7y ago

I wonder if China has a social credit score API that companies can integrate to prevent sign-ups from known bad actors. Would be an interesting concept.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
ReCAPTCHA v3?

everybodyknows 7y ago

There's lots of great info on Yelp and Google reviews, if you know how to filter it. Two distinct filters are required, actually, one for the corrupt, and another for the clueless. Corrupt reviewer are the fake business locations, paid shills, employees, relatives, customers trading a 5-star review for a 10% discount. Smoke these out with the following tells. Review history: absent or all 5-star. Text content: description of service absent or generic description of service, zero negative or neutral specifics, hyperbolic declarations of loyalty. Clueless reviewers leave easier tells, but can be more plentiful. Review history is bipolar, all single- or five-star. Text content shows misunderstanding of what the vendor actually does, expressed with many errors of grammar, and irrelevant detail. May be excessively negative, due to unreasonable expectations of the vendor. So, reading a good sample of reviewer's text is required. This does consume a few more minutes of your day.