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Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
- chrisbolt 6y ago(2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232
- tyingq 6y ago"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it's really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.” - Yelp's founder on why Google is a problem.
- baq 6y agolearn from the best.
- colpabar 6y agoI have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
- fairity 6y ago> The Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you? I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses. That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
- nitrogen 6y ago"$10 off your next service if you give us a review on Yelp" is just the tip of an iceberg of complaints people have about online review systems, including Yelp. I was once traveling and some friends found a highly reviewed place on Yelp. When we got there it turned out the glowing reviews were all written by the owner's son. At least he felt bad enough about it to give us free dessert.
- _jal 6y agoI typically search for things "-yelp". They're an annoying and mostly useless. I haven't bothered to look in a long time, but the reviews I've seen are obviously bad. I can find menus on the restaurant's real page. The locality views are worse than, say, Apple maps. There's just no reason to use them. Add in that they harm the livelihood of restaurants owned by people I like, and yeah, they're another crap site that continues to be annoying by trying to get in between me and someone who wants to feed me.
- kjs3 6y agoCompletely disagree. Reviews generated by "give a good review and we'll give you a prize" and "I'd hate to see you hit with a bunch of bad reviews because you didn't pay us more money" are completely worthless and are the core of Yelps business model. It's the definition of easy-to-game and untrustworthy.
- ddingus 6y agoTwo things: Hardest to game is like lesser evils. Lesser evils remain evil, as hard games remain played. I personally value direct interactions with people I do business with more than ever in my life. Too many middle companies all working some angle to make more than the value they may actually deliver. Well, a few things: Trust in all this kind of service is reaching a low ebb. We keep finding incidents where the behavior is not as represented. Frankly, the money might be too good. And that's fine. Is what it is, people do what they do I am stepping back, reevaluating these kinds of value propositions, and recommending peers do the same.
- cosmie 6y agoAs far as I recall, Yelp predates Google having any of those features at all. So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
- 60secz 6y agoding ding ding Value propositions without a moat (durable competitive advantage) will be swallowed by vertical integration of their feature set.
- pydry 6y ago>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over. Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same. Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
- tartoran 6y agoIf users would hit yelp.com and searched for a restaurant and somehow google intercepted that then they'd be a parasite. The way I see it it is a symbiotic somewhat relationship, at least in theory. Yelp is a parasite on businesses though, they attempt to extort money and give no value in exchange, often times unsuccessfully. Here's an older anecdote I posted about yelp [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790918
- milesskorpen 6y agoWhile there are definitely anecdotes about this kind of behavior, I have yet to see evidence of systemic or corporate-sponsored effort to do this. I believe this is more a question of possibly poorly-incentivized sales people rather than an intentional strategy on behalf of Yelp. I think this is backed up by a number of lawsuits that haven't gone anywhere. I might be mistaken; if there is a source showing this is really systemic, I'd be very interested. Either way, Google now does many of the same things that Yelp does (reviews, photos, metadata management) - but it doesn't really care about the space, apart from being good enough to beat its competition. While today maybe they're motivated to build better products to compete with Yelp for eyeballs, overtime I think this means the reviews space will stagnate. That's unfortunate. I think this is the core Google problem: They have so much top-of-funnel traffic that they just have to do things "good enough" to crush entire industries of competition. The bar to be sufficiently better enough than "good enough" to build a meaningful competitor to G in any vertical is so high it stops many potential competitors from even trying. The only companies that manage it are ones that have entirely different & massive profitable business models like Apple. Everywhere Google is, the sector stagnates: Search! RSS readers (with a bit of a renaissance since Google Reader died). Email. Calendars. News lists. Increasingly, reviews. Fortunately MSFT pushes them in docs and hopefully Apple continues to do so in Maps and browsers.
- gumby 6y agoWe drove up the Oregon coast and my GF used Yelp to find good places for us to stop and eat. I was frankly astonished as, like you, I've found Yelp pretty useless at best.
- muststopmyths 6y agoThere was an xkcd about this, but i've found anything below 4.5 stars is mediocre. Above that you find a better probability of a good meal, but it's still just a probability. I find it servers as a good filter for the awful stuff, which is what I really care about when travelling.
- gumby 6y agoI have a friend who has run a restaurant for decades with a customer base that is almost entirely regulars. She has encouraged us to leave bad yelp reviews as she has found "yelpers" (different from people who simply consult yelp) to be a pain in the neck...plus wants space to be available for the regulars.
- werber 6y agoYelp as a social network is actually pretty cool, if you get their elite status for the year you get invited to some pretty fun free events, and I know they've done socially distanced ones since the pandemic, I heard about a murder mystery somewhere. Now that I don't participate in that I don't really use the platform often.
- anaganisk 6y agoEvery big tech is a hypocrite, suprised?
- jamestimmins 6y agoVery cool update at the top of the article "NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here." Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
- thursday0987 6y ago> that don't end in a sale. i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless. edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
- aaron-santos 6y agoHave any data to back up that claim?
- reaperducer 6y agoProbably not. That’s what makes it a bet. But if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, it certainly seems logical.
- xapata 6y ago"How late are you open tonight? Ok, thanks."
- chc 6y agoIt seems unlikely that there is a large contingent of people who Google a restaurant (which they must be doing in order to get Yelp's number), ignore the listing of hours right next to the number and call the restaurant to get the hours. I believe it happens, but I have a hard time believing that particular sequence of events accounts for even one call in 50.
- bigbubba 6y agoYelp executives belong in prison for fraud.
- Retric 6y agoSeems obvious that a company could sue them for fraud by misrepresenting a phone number. I really don’t understand how or why this could be legal.
- bigbubba 6y agoThe problem is yelp has more money for lawyers than a low-margin local restaurant. That's why this should be treated as a criminal matter, with state prosecutors taking down Yelp.
- incongruity 6y agoBut a restaurant association (like the one mentioned in the article) could definitely foot the bill to get a class action started.
- daniellarusso 6y agoCould this be considered a RICO violation? Is this not bribery?
- reaperducer 6y agoYeah, the feds will get right on that. Ob Lebowski: “Leads, yeah sure. I'll uh, just check with the boys down at the Crime Lab. They uh, got uh, four more detectives working on the case. They've got us working in shifts.”
- daniellarusso 6y agoCivil RICO does not need the feds.
- 6y ago
- draw_down 6y agoThis is so annoying. You never know when they're doing this, so if you're looking at a restaurant in Yelp, you have to switch to maps or the browser to look up the phone number.
- stevespang 6y agoTypical Yelp. My business has been blackmailed multiple times on Yelp - - "pay us $500 by bitcoin and we won't trash you with a false complaint".. Now I have 2 complaints because I refuse to cave in to crooks. Yelp is an accomplice.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoWhy is Yelp not being charged with fraud?
- olivermarks 6y agoThe problem with these fast moving situations is who would actually initiate that expensive legal endeavor. Yelp has a history of preying on small businesses with what is effectively extortion to remove promoted negative online reviews in what are essentially digital protection rackets. You could argue this is RICO territory. This new pernicious hijacking of contact details is likely to be deployed by other future 'startups' to siphon off profits, so it's important that Yelp gets sanctioned.
- floatingatoll 6y agoRestaurants are terrified to sue Yelp because of the severe power differential between the "phone book" directory and themselves, especially given the long-standing rumors (whether true or not, the perception exists) that Yelp punishes anyone that complains by promoting bad reviews to their page.
- adrr 6y agoI am not a big fan of regulations unless it is to provide more transparency so people can make informed decisions. There should be regulations that require when listing a number for a business that there is a large disclaimer when the number isn’t actually owned by the business. I am sure that will kill this practice.
- baggachipz 6y agoApple's use of Yelp in Apple Maps is the one reason I can't uninstall Google Maps completely from my devices.
- AlexandrB 6y agoIt's a pretty lousy partnership, and getting more details on a business from within Maps means installing (and using) the Yelp app.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoApple has started their own reviews and database of businesses, so I expect Yelp to be replaced in a few years in Apple Maps.
- baggachipz 6y agoRight, which I absolutely refuse to do. I'm actually pretty surprised that Apple enables this and depends on Yelp so heavily. Like the other commenter said, I look forward to Apple creating their own service for this.
- daniellarusso 6y agoCould this be considered libel? ‘Publishing’ knowingly ‘wrong’ phone numbers associated with a business, would that cause damages?
- jellicle 6y agoNot libel but instead: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unfair-trade-practice.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unfair-trade-practice.a... I honestly don't understand why various state attorneys haven't taken this on. Not enough complaints?
- specialist 6y agoI consider this inauthentic speech (impersonation, fraud). I'm now looking for model legislation, ideas on how to fix this. As said upthread, I'm meeting with two of my reps. Please share any ideas.
- mdasen 6y agoI'd guess (and it is a guess) that it wouldn't fall under this because Yelp would only show this "inauthentic" number for businesses that have signed an agreement with Yelp. Yelp is going to be a mix of businesses that are just listed and have no relationship with Yelp and then things like a restaurant that has signed an agreement for GrubHub to handle some ordering for them. That agreement could include something like, "you agree that orders received via GrubHub will have this fee structure that you have to pay us and orders that come in via phone from our website are also considered an order generated by us and will have this fee structure". At that point, the business is "agreeing" to that phone number. I put "agreeing" in quotes because restaurants might feel like they're compelled to agree or lose out on significant business given Yelp's market position. I think it's harder to allege impersonation or fraud if the business has agreed to it. I think it's easier to allege that the business didn't really have a choice in the matter given the company's dominance in the market.
- specialist 6y ago
- germinalphrase 6y agoI understand charging a fee to the customer who is making the choice to call, but if a restaurant simply answers the phone - how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?
- lotsofpulp 6y ago> how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee? In America, only the government is allowed to come up to you and say pay me this without you consenting. In all the businesses I’ve been involved with for over 2 decades, there are plenty of times someone sends an invoice for something you didn’t agree to, and you can always just ignore it.
- germinalphrase 6y agoThat would be my expectation. I was unaware that these businesses had preexisting business relationship with Grubhub. Still shady.
- yholio 6y agoIt's not Yelp who is charging them. They have a pre-existing business relation with Grubhub that generates leads for them for a fee, and, according to Yelp, allows Grubhub to charge them for any lead generated on any partner platform, which Yelp became in 2018. So now what used to be a free stream of customers is hijacked by Grubhub. I'm sure it hasn't crossed their minds when they signed up with Grubhub that in addition to new sales generated with them, they will also start paying commission on their existing clientele. A business owner trapped in a market where the Grubhub-Yelp duopoly is proeminent is basically fucked, and they will use their rent seeking revenues to further entrench their dominance by offering consumer discounts, fidelity options etc.
- fma 6y agoFor the record, I dislike this practice...but to play devil's advocate (pls don't downvote for playing devil's advocate LOL) If I go to Google and I type in {name of my favorite restaurant}...and the first link on top is an ad placed by that restaurant, and below it is the actual restaurant's website...If I click on that ad, Google will charge that restaurant money, when it just redirects me to the website. In this case, GrubHub is claiming that they placed the phone number on Yelp, so they get money. I mean I think paying $8 (or whatever percentage of an order is) for that redirect is highway robbery given thin margins for a restaurant...
- fairity 6y agoI see a lot of people saying this must be illegal, and the reason Yelp hasn't been sued is because restaurant owners can't afford legal fees. Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.
- Spivak 6y agoI’m sure the restaurant will be very happy to receive their $15 Yelp Ad credit 7 years down the road.
- ajb 6y agoIn 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator). If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them. We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change... [edited for punctuation]
- castratikron 6y agoI would say there's no moral difference between a human operator and a mechanical operator whose behavior is controlled by a human. Configuring the operator to drop calls from a particular area code would be an example in the case you provided.
- ajb 6y agoSure. It just used to be harder to build in, and to do so precisely. In your example, dropping calls from an area code, that's a relatively coarse filter. There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black poor people in buses could not [1, p123]. These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away. [1] "Do Artifacts have politics" https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
- krisgee 6y ago>These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away. And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles. This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confront the biases that we have and try and build ways to expose biases we don't even realize we have. This is obviously quite hard and if I had a solution to it I'd probably be implementing it instead of waxing poetic on HN.
- lacker 6y agoThis article really buries the lede, that all of these restaurants agreed to pay GrubHub for any leads that GrubHub generated. Sounds like the restaurants should simply stop buying GrubHub’s marketing service, if it isn’t worthwhile for them.
- jazzkingrt 6y agoThe "marketing service" just means being listed at all on GrubHub itself. So restaurant owners are agreeing to a big fee to get customers from the GrubHub website and app. But it sounds like they often don't know that they are also being made to pay a fee for their own customers who are simply looking up the phone number. GrubHub isn't obviously adding any value there, these customers could just as well have pulled the phone number from Google Maps of the restaurant's own website. I think GrubHub could be acting incorrectly in few ways: 1. Restaurants don't appear to be well informed of the cost. Deceiving your customer (eg by sneaking clauses into the contract) doesn't feel right. 2. GrubHub could be deceiving the restaurant's customers, who may be making a sincere effort to order from the restaurant directly. 3. In some local markets; GrubHub might have a kind of monopoly power. I think are a lot more constraints on how these kinds of businesses can dictate terms to other business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_restraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_restraints
- donmcronald 6y agoIt's a prisoner's dilemma. If a company like GrubHub decides they're going to build a demand aggregation platform for a certain market segment, part of that is going to include significant advertising to acquire users (demand). They'll also offer a good (or great) looking deal to vendors (supply). So, if you're a vendor, the appeal of early adoption is huge. You get access to a platform with a bunch of free advertising and a built in set of potential customers. The platform might let you reduce costs (shut down your website) and, as an early adopter, a lot of those potential customers become your customers in the short term. Then, as vendors keep joining the platform, it becomes de facto market for those goods. That's the point where the demand aggregation has succeeded and the vendors get converted into a commodity. Customers want a class of product, not a specific product. So now, you _must_ be on the platform to succeed even if you hate it and you're just another cog in supply side of the system, The company (like GrubHub) that successfully aggregated demand can rent seek for as long as they maintain the demand monopoly and there's nothing a single vendor can do about it. Get used to it because every industry susceptible to demand aggregation is going to look like the food industry soon IMO.
- Dumblydorr 6y agoI never use Yelp because they have very sketchy/bullying business practices. I much prefer word of mouth and Google, combined those two are more than enough for my needs.
- diego_moita 6y agoWhen 2 extortionists (Yelp and Grubhub) meet, what you get is extortion 2.0. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” ― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
- macjohnmcc 6y agoI won't be relying on Yelp for providing me any value with all the shady crap they are doing.
- proverbialbunny 6y agoDoes anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about: - Open Now (Optional) - Sort by Rating - Search by food category, not name of restaurant. Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.
- gkoberger 6y agoFoursquare! I prefer it to Yelp, and the people running it care about making a good, non-scammy product. EDIT: It's mostly a mobile app, and their web version is here: https://foursquare.com/city-guide https://foursquare.com/city-guide
- proverbialbunny 6y agoThanks, but is it https://foursquare.com/ https://foursquare.com/ ? I don't see a search bar.
- gkoberger 6y agoHere you go! https://foursquare.com/city-guide https://foursquare.com/city-guide (I mostly use the app. It also keeps track of everywhere I've been, and I can see my history over the past decade.)
- proverbialbunny 6y agoThank you! (And thanks for the info of a mobile map!) One more question: Does it have a sort by ranking? I can't seem to find it on the desktop site. I may need to run it in Chrome. On Firefox it may not be displaying properly. I know it sounds silly, but I really do need a sort by rating. This is still far better than nothing. Thank you. ^_^
- darkwizard42 6y agoWhile the solution from NYC seems good to start, why don't customers get charged for fees if they are the ones calling? I feel like in the US splitting fees between the caller and receiver causes a lot of problems (see: spam calls which can become prohibitively expensive if the caller has to eat all the fees)
- MattGaiser 6y agoCustomers balk at fees in many cases. Free shipping doesn't really make sense as it is baked into the item price, but it gets a lot more people to buy.
- elefanten 6y agoYelp is one those companies. I use the product regularly, but I hate doing so -- the experience is awful and the core information is rarely particularly helpful. But they still get me to come in because they have the most information about some places. What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.
- dilyevsky 6y agoNothing moral about their crusade - they got booted from the top of the search results along with other doorway-style crap like about.com and their conversion probably fell off the cliff. Had to explain that to investors somehow I suppose...
- elefanten 6y agoSure but it was framed, in the consumer-facing messaging, as such. They also didn't get booted from search -- they're still always capturing/clogging the top results. Google added all their own cruft at the top, but the search results haven't changed.
- dilyevsky 6y agoI personally haven’t worked on search anything so don’t know the details. From purely user perspective (and very anecdotal) some search results were almost entirely seo spam from about.com, yelp, etc but it’s no longer the case.
- mywittyname 6y agoWhy do you use Yelp? I've never needed it because every restaurant that I go to is on Google or maintains their own website. It's been known for years now that the reviews on Yelp are largely fake and they hide legit ones, so it's nearly useless for that as well. At least with Google Maps reviews, I can click on the reviewer and see the other places they've been.
- princevegeta89 6y agoGoogle has already screwed Yelp long ago by introducing all Yelp features and relevant data right within their Search and Maps.
- gumby 6y agoThis seems like a clear false / deceptive advertising issue, not protected as a Section 230 safe harbor act, that should easily be addressable by the FTC.
- 1-6 6y agoCan't defeat a restaurant named 1-800-YELPSUX
- Spivak 6y agoWait I don’t get the hate over this. This isn’t Grubhub pretending to be the restaurant or anything. This is Grubhub doing the equivalent of Google Search’s link tracking but for phone numbers so that they can attribute the sale to Yelp. Is it weird that Yelp has made referral codes for phone calls?
- AlexandrB 6y agoIn many cases, neither Yelp nor Grubhub are adding value here. They are inserting themselves as rentiers because they are better at SEO (i.e. have more money) than the restaurants themselves. It amounts to a shakedown similar to domain squatting. That's not to mention the surveillance capitalism angle of phone calls that would previously be private now being recorded by Grubhub.
- DanBC 6y ago> When a user clicks on the “Call” button labeled “Delivery or Takeout,” they are taken to a different number, (646) 394-9837, which is owned by Grubhub. > Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews. But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.” > In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. These feel like deceiving the customer.
- Spivak 6y agoWhen a user clicks on the "link" in Google Search to Wikipedia labeled "Wikipedia" they are taken to a different site https://www.google.com/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikipedia.org%2F https://www.google.com/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikipedia.o... which is owned by Google. I don't think Grubhub has any defense for creating websites for restaurants without asking. But this is something they've also stopped doing and this is a completely separate issue.
- ir77 6y agoas much as i like apple, one thing i absolutely hate is that searching for anything in apple maps brings up yelp suggestions for restaurant: 1) not only are you faced with downloadin the yelp app to look at more pictures which are present on the first page but 2) after reading articles like these i'm in concern that instead of supporting my local mom and pop restaurants i'm now being routed intentionally through god knows who. i know this is yelp article, but apple and other companies relie on yelp, and if they choke off this behavior it would be a good step to correcting it.
- judge2020 6y agoApple is on their way to replace Yelp thankfully: https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/26/apple-maps-reviews-inhouse/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/26/apple-maps-reviews-inhouse/
- throw03172019 6y agoWhat are the best replacements of Yelp? As a user, their “sponsored” section showing me Subway ads when searching for something in an entirely different class is starting to annoy me. If I missed their “Sponsored” title, I would assume there were no results matching what I am looking for.
- Jugurtha 6y agoI don't understand. Why do you have to call the joint on an application? Yelp isn't available here, but on the local apps (Algeria), I can make the order by clicking on foods, adding quantities, adding drinks, then confirming the order. For every joint, there's their menu with different tabs (drinks, desserts, pizzas, burgers, briskets, pastrami, etc) custom for every joint. The app then tells me when the joint has accepted the order, when the rider picked up my order, and where the rider is. The rider comes to the office, gives me food, I give them money, and good bye. I can even click to re-order the same thing, or make several orders from different places (when you want food from several places). And if the joint is not featured in the app, you can make a custom order where you describe what you want, and put the address of the joint. You can even just buy items (chocolate bars, water) on the app. I don't understand why do you have to call on an app. That sucks.
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago> I don't understand why do you have to call on an app. That sucks. I call every restaurant I order from because I want the restaurant taking every dime of the order. I don't want Grubhub or Doordash or whoever "facilitates the transaction" to take a percentage of my order. Worse yet, some restaurants in my area have wised up and increased menu item prices for app-facilitated purchases only to avoid margin erosion, so I'm definitely not going to pay more for the privilege of "clicking buttons on an app". I will use Yelp or Grubhub on occasion for discoverability. Hyper-SEO has lead to real restaurant websites falling out of my Google results, so sometimes I need to look up their phone number. Yelp knows that there are people like me, and are now positioning themselves to suck more cash out of my local restaurants by hijacking my phone call to them. Fuck that, no more Yelp for me. I'll continue adding known good phone numbers to my phone & taking pictures of paper menus so I can refer to them when I want.
- llacb47 6y ago2019
- TYPE_FASTER 6y agoI Googled a local Indian restaurant I wanted to order from this weekend. The top result had the restaurant name and looked like their site. Online ordering sent me to MealHi5, which didn't seem to think there are any restaurants in our area. So I called, ordered, and asked about online order when I picked up the food. It turns out they have a different domain that is setup (I think, and/or Google is good at recognizing restaurants) to show an "Order Online" button under the Google business summary. That takes me to a different online ordering site that isn't MealHi5 that I'm assuming works. I'm assuming either a service did the "register a domain for all the local restaurants" trick, or they switched restaurant hosting providers and the domain changed but not the top result in Google, or something else.
- tb303 6y agoI mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
- aledalgrande 6y agoBe curious to see Yelp's "culture" booklet
- pavel_lishin 6y agoIt's probably as relevant to the decisions driving Yelp's frankly criminal activity, as a handbook handed out to ants is to the anthill itself.
- kjs3 6y agoYeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
- Diederich 6y agoWhat do you use, if you don't mind sharing? My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is. While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.
- kjs3 6y ago90% of the time, I ask someone. A real person. Apps are probably never going to be the answer unless something drastic changes, because the app developers have proven over and over they're more interested in maximizing revenue at all cost, not delivering me a good experience. And the "social media"/gamification of the user community is full of perverse incentives resulting in nothing you can trust.
- bichiliad 6y agoI think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables). In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result. I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
- gerbal 6y ago> Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
- Kalium 6y ago> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant. What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map. Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
- smrtinsert 6y agoI don't get it. It's well known yelp is awful. Why hasn't a competitor emerged to take them on?
- jessaustin 6y agoThe position occupied by Yelp only generates opportunities to scam. There's no natural surplus-generating business there. Few entrepreneurs would choose to compete for that, when they're just starting out. Maybe some would be forced into it after too many pivots, but Yelp is probably clever enough to stay ahead of them.
- spike021 6y agoUsually I double-check a phone number for a restaurant across yelp/google maps/a website IFF they have one. Some smaller shops don't have websites, though, or at least not very good ones.
- aaron695 6y agoThe First Amendment applies to government. How many @#@$ times do we have to say this. You have no right to free speech with a private company. Stop talking about it. They don't want you publish your phone numbers, they don't have to. Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- zadkey 6y agoIts true that we (Americans) don't have a the right to free speech with a private company. But that doesn't mean we should stop talking about it. Clearly there is reason to believe people cannot express themselves freely enough. When all modes of modern communication are privately owned and there are no government run equivalents it does kind limit expression. Nowadays you are limited to where exactly that you can express yourself within your first amendment rights? Let's see, a police station, a courthouse, a town hall meeting, and a protest. Did I miss any? Nothing on your smart phone that is for sure. None of these places have reach or exposure equivalent to facebook, twitter, youtube, etc. Change cannot come if we refuse to acknowledge the existence of a problem. We cannot bring about meaningful change by refusing to talk about an issue. There are many ways to solve this issue, but ignoring it or saying that all is as intended is not one of them. We must demand meaningful change from our governments.
- wayanon 6y agoIs Yelp a big thing in the US? In the UK I’ve never heard of anyone using it.
- OliverJones 6y agoWhen I order from a local restaurant, I want THEM to get my money, not somebody in sili valley. Yelp skims using this man-in-the-middle attack on the restaurant's telephones. (Payment card companies skim too, but there's a lot of competition in that field so it's under control.) Yelp might argue that I, the purchaser, am not hurt by their shenanigans, so I shouldn't worry about it. But, on the contrary, I am hurt when my local restaurants have their margins shaved. Several have had to close their doors in my neighborhood. How am I hurt? For one thing I like the restaurants that closed. For another, I have neighbors and friends among restaurant owners and workers. For a third, some of my tax and charity money goes to helping unemployed people. AT THE VERY LEAST Yelp's recorded announcement ("awesomeness???") should inform me that I'm going through a third party. My local telco just delivered a printed Yellow Pages book for the first time in many years. I'm going to use it. I'm going to keep the takeout menus I get. I wonder if this can be called "wire fraud" in some new telecom regulations?
- disillusioned 6y agoNightmare scenario: the yellow pages have replaced all the business numbers with Grubhub numbers...
- skrtskrt 6y agoIt is really a shame to me that DuckDuckGo uses Yelp reviews in their search results. I understand they want to use a common review provider that's not Google, but Yelp is just so antithetical to the stated values of DDG
- jaryd 6y agoWe actually moved to TripAdvisor a few months ago.
- bruceb 6y agoWow, you answered 2 minutes after this question was asked. Does DDG have something setup to notify them when DDG is mentioned on HN?
- ffpip 6y ago'DDG' is mentioned too many times on HN. They will just get spam. Maybe just a coincidence.
- skrtskrt 6y agoAh that is great to see! Was the motivation about Yelp's practices or UX, or both? Also is TripAdvisor the long-term plan or a stop-gap until a better 3rd party provider matures or something homegrown catches on?
- mabbo 6y agoAs I've said before of such practices, I want to start a website called "Grubhub-help.com" or something like that. Buy a lot of ads on google. Then I'll redirect customers that go there to whoever pays me the most money. It's literally the same business model that grubhub/yelp have- misrepresenting myself as another company in order to make money- but turned around on them. And maybe to make it more fun, if nobody pays then I'll just redirect the user to 4chan or some other ugly corner of the internet.
- rootusrootus 6y agoAt some level shouldn't Google feel some heat here? Yelp and GrubHub may be gaming the SEO, but Google owns the kingdom. This problem is prevalent enough that Google can't claim not to know about it. And they've certainly invested time in the past to make the algorithms give preference to more likely correct information. They should be penalizing Yelp and GrubHub sites, they're easy enough to recognize. It won't take too long before people just quit trusting Google search results. That's probably for the best, unless you're Google, which is why I'm surprised they haven't nipped this practice in the bud.
- littlecranky67 6y agoI fail to understand how exactly yelp/grubhub would bill the 10-20% of the order amount of the phone call. The call is recorded, yes (a reason why they can forget about that in the EU, in the EU you would need to implement a system for the caller to deny consent of the recording while on the line other than "if you don't like being recorded hang up now"). But do they manually listen to every phone call, make sure the restaurant place tells the correct amount, calculate their fee and put this on a bill to the restaurant?
- mbrameld 6y agoA podcast I listen to just did an episode about this, specifically GrubHub. It's an automated system that analyzes the call, and it seemed to charge for any call over 45 seconds where food was discussed. As far as the amount goes, they used the average of the last X orders placed through the GrubHub app for that restaurant and charged some percentage of that. Then the owner is able to log in to their GrubHub account and see a list of all the calls they were charged for, listen to each one, and dispute any that didn't actually result in an order. The system is garbage.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThey could set up a forwarding phone number as a way of proving effectiveness of advertising if they only publish the phone number there. A consensual arrangement is basically the only way it could work for all circumstances pick up or delivery through the number.
- koonsolo 6y agoThere is a valuable lesson here for all entrepreneurs: always make sure you are in direct contact with the customer! Have their email address, etc. If not, someones else will control the stream of inflow, and you are at their mercy. Getting the customer is always the hardest part.
- raydev 6y agoThis is from June 2019. Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232
- smoyer 6y agoFriends don't let friends dial through Yelp ... seriously, this is one of a (growing) handful of companies whose web-pages I just won't visit.
- ratsmack 6y agoThis whole setup seems smarmy and illegal. Hopefully some class action is rallied against this deceptive practice.
- sfblah 6y agoMy wife and I stopped using Yelp a couple years ago because of all sorts of nonsense on their platform. We find much better reviews on city-specific subreddits.
- jxramos 6y agoI think I stopped actually using Yelp for phone numbers and just use Google Maps simply for convenience. They keep a pretty decent set of business details up to date. I often use them to lookup company headquarters. Never knew or experienced Yelp polluting the business details.
- exabrial 6y agoBetween extorting small businesses to this, Yelp is a terrible company. The list of unethical things they do is piling up.
- nkrisc 6y agoKeep it simple: I kept a basket of takeout menus from my favorite neighborhood restaurants in the kitchen. Call the number on the takeout menu. In the event you call and your menu is out of date, it's a minor inconvenience and you'll grab a new one when you go get your food. I never had a restaurant give me trouble because I had an old menu, usually they were happy I'd been a customer so long I had an old menu. New restaurant? Yeah, you might end up calling from some shady Yelp number but then you add the takeout menu to your collection and use that number next time. We don't need the internet to order from restaurants. Plus there's something nice about the time your favorite restaurant starts to recognize your number.
- ineedasername 6y agoPretty much every restaurant has a website these days. I go there. If they offer direct delivery, I use it. If they don't, they usually link to the grubhub etc. service they use, and I order there. At least then I know the restaurant was a fully consenting partner in the revenue share agreement.
- WalterBright 6y agoSounds like a business opportunity for a startup that treats restaurants better.
- bjt 6y agoAugust 2019.
- homero 6y agoWow they listen to these calls to figure out how much the order was?
- chimen 6y agoI read so many bad things about Yelp's shady business that I'm surprised they are still a hot topic. And I never used their services since I'm eastern European. Why are they still in business?
- stuaxo 6y agoAh, intermediation - that's the scam we're all here for though, right ?
- anonytrary 6y agoIt's basically just a forced affiliate program. I mean, they have a case for taking e.g. 10% or something, but it's sort of silly to not ask for consent as such a large company.
- xivzgrev 6y agoI never call the “delivery number” since I became aware of this sham. But most people probably don’t, so good to keep talking about it. I’d encourage you to do the same and tell your friends too.
- areoform 6y agoThere's an impolite term for someone like them in politics. Ratfuckers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking Yelp is ratfucking the entire tech industry. When the post dot-com wave of consumer companies arrived, they found a market that was more likely to trust them - the scrappy underdog - than the big, evil corporation. They were a breath of fresh air. A needed change in a stale ecosystem. Jon Favreau said he based Iron Man off of Elon Musk. Tech was cool. And more importantly trusted. And then Yelp & co arrived. Uber at least had the decency to start out by screwing over the competition. They did their best to avoid screwing over the customers. But Yelp? Yelp doesn't give a fuck. They're ratfuckers to the core, and they'll torch everyone and everything if it helps them get a quarterly bonus. Or, so I've heard.
- abalone 6y agoOh this is not the first time Yelp has done this. Back in the day they tried charging businesses a fee to list a number and iirc it was per call. So they listed a proxy number so they could track and bill. The crazy thing is to prevent search engines from indexing it (and getting sued for false billing) they rendered the number in an image-that-looks-like-text instead of text. I wonder if they are doing anything to prevent indexing of these false numbers or if they just don’t care now.
- sologoub 6y agoNot unique to Yelp and not their invention. The overall industry around utilizing dedicated phone numbers to measure effectiveness of ads goes back a while. This is collectively referred to as “Call Tracking”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call-tracking_software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call-tracking_software The term evolved well before the current “tracking” lingo. The more usual examples included yellow pages ads featuring phone numbers that forwarded to the businesses and allowed publishers to count how many “leads” were sent. Apartment listings magazines used these extensively, car ads, etc. - pretty much anything print or direct response web. While Yelps use case may raise ire, the base tech and many of the implementations definitely are not intended to device. For a long time, most were toll-free numbers, as local numbers were too expensive, especially before VoIP became ubiquitous.
- jacquesm 6y agoGoogle results for businesses and even government institutions here in NL are rife with numbers that have been replaced by expensive 1-900 numbers that connect you through to the business whose number you intended to reach. Very lucrative and highly unethical, and Google being part and parcel of this makes them look particularly bad. If anything Google should know what the right phone number for a business is, and if they can't even get that right you have to wonder about the quality of their results in general. Of course the page of the business or entity you look for should be the top result for its own search query.
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoNowaday ppl doing nothing valuable... So they scrap free and public things as little than a phone numbers to rent it... Awfully... Internet is a SHIT HOLE FILLED OF STINKY CRAP... you have been warned...