4 ms·
I use yelp when in a new city to find restaurants and have been favorably impressed with its ability to weed out the wheat from the chaff. I would definitely be
by bbobb 18y ago
I use yelp when in a new city to find restaurants and have been favorably impressed with its ability to weed out the wheat from the chaff. I would definitely be concerned if Yelp were strong arming content to make money.
At first when I was reading this, I couldn't help but think why Google's Adwords (which I heartily love) doesn't strike me as seedy, but I guess it comes down to how the service is sold. Adwords is opt in without any pressure and a lot of tools that at least make me feel like I'm optimizing my buck. I think if I were called by an Adwords rep and asked to spend more cash or else my pagerank "might go down," I'd feel just about the same as I do about the hypothetical Yelp sales practices.
That said, I'm with you dpifke, it doesn't help the credibility of such an incendiary article that it appears in a lesser-known publication.
- nostrademons 18y agoAdwords also clearly labels which results are sponsored and doesn't touch the non-sponsored ones. I think the meat of the allegations in this article are that users have no way of knowing whether a negative review was left by Yelp staff, or a positive one was hidden because the business didn't pay up, or a negative one was hidden because the business did pay.
- webwright 18y agoAdwords labels results, but I'm not sure I'll grant clearly. If you plunk down the average middle aged person in front of Google search results and say, "click the first result", do you think they click the light orange ad at the top of the list? If you told them that was an ad afterward, do you think the average person would've known that? Or, put it another way-- if you inverted the ad color (light on dark) or put a dark border and bolder ad label, do you think CTR would drop dramatically? I do.