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SF Restaurant Sign Calls Yelp ‘Bully,’ Integrity of Reviews Questioned
- error54 14y agoLink to referenced article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-yelp-20130420,0,7824145,full.column http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-yelp-20130420,...
- pspeter3 14y agoThis is why I use Cloudy [http://askcloudy.com/ http://askcloudy.com/]. They don't do any of this nonsense and it's better to see reviews from friends anyway.
- mdesq 14y agoIt seems that Yelp is turning into something like the BBB, ultimately holding the good name of organizations hostage, whether or not that was the original intent.
- rgbrenner 14y agoI think that's a little unfair. Yes, there have been some instances of that happening with the BBB... but when one of their sales people contacted me to sign up to become a BBB accredited business, I asked if it would affect my rating negatively if I refused, and the sales person was very adamant that it would not. So I declined, but she updated my profile with how long I was in business (adding an extra 3 years), and that improved my rating from A- to A+. Which is my company's current rating, even though I have never given them a dime.. all I do is respond to customers who file complaints with them.
- beachstartup 14y agothe only thing i use yelp for nowadays is directions and general info like phone number or hours of operations. looking restaurants / dry cleaners / whatever up in google and/or apple maps is pretty much useless when you're on the go. whereas on yelp, you simply enter the name (or ethnic category), click on the map, and there you go. quite frankly i stopped using yelp for reviews as soon as the idiots took over. /hipster
- epoxyhockey 14y agoquite frankly i stopped using yelp for reviews I have too. My preferred method of searching for "good" restaurants is: 1) Viewing reviews on Opentable when making reservations (to discover which dishes are good) 2) Looking at the Zagat rating when clicking on a restaurant in Google maps (which is more analogous to a hotel's star rating and is more objective)
- hawkharris 14y agoIf the claims are true, it's a big deal. Losing half a star on Yelp can translate into 20 percent fewer people coming to your restaurant on a busy Friday night, according to a study by two UC Berkeley economists: http://www.dailycal.org/2012/09/06/online-customer-reviews-affect-restaurant-business/ http://www.dailycal.org/2012/09/06/online-customer-reviews-a...
- d0mine 14y agoThe article says that probability of a restaurant being sold out at peak hours changes by 20 percent, not number of people.
- johnnygoods 14y agoThis is not the first, second, or third time such allegations have been raised, but they always devolve into he-said/she-said. Restauranteurs, when you're calling Yelp to ask about missing reviews, RECORD THE CONVERSATION! One recording of a Yelp rep saying something like that is game over.
- gyardley 14y agoOne recording of a Yelp rep saying something like that is one instance of a sales guy lying to make a sale so he can get a commission or make a quota. You know, something that happens all the time. Yelp could never manipulate reviews and this restaurant owner could have been told exactly what he claims. The two things aren't mutually incompatible.
- danielweber 14y agoSo who is responsible for what Yelp's representatives say? Are they just a force of nature?
- gyardley 14y agoYelp, obviously, but 'greedy lying sales guy' is a different class of problem than 'company-wide extortion scheme'.
- evan_ 14y agoJust remember that California is a two-party consent state when it comes to wiretapping- if the other party does not know and understand that you are recording the conversation, it will not be admissible in court proceedings.
- pyre 14y agoMaybe not in court proceedings, but definitely will affect the court of public opinion.
- yoloprocro 14y ago
- smackfu 14y agoLooking at their yelp page, they do have 5 star reviews, and they also have 1 star reviews. There are few filtered reviews, but they aren't universally high ratings or anything, and I think Yelp does filter out users with a single review that is 5 stars because they are usually fake. I'm also sure that a restaurant feels that recent reviews should be weighted heavily, almost exclusively, and that those two star reviews from last year should be ignored.
- nnnnni 14y ago> I'm also sure that a restaurant feels that recent reviews should be weighted heavily, almost exclusively, and that those two star reviews from last year should be ignored. I agree 100% with that. It's very possible for a restaurant to get better or go downhill in a year. If a restaurant has a rough opening but drastically improves after a few months, the early 1-star reviews can do some serious long-term damage even if they're a year old.
- crosbytho 14y agoI agree -- recency is more important IMO. Particularly reflecting change in management, change in processes, etc. For restaurants that aren't chains, processes may not be tried and tested -- first week jitters, hell, first month/quarter jitters should be accounted for.
- bickfordb 14y agoHow is this any different than Google selling ads and deranking spam?
- thedufer 14y agoI think the reasoning is that showing ads, and marking them as such, is just fine. Bumping scores that are marked as customer reviews just because the business is buying ads would not be fine. This is not the first time that someone has accused Yelp of doing the latter in addition to the former.
- Millennium 14y agoThe ads Google sells are marked as advertising. Spam isn't; it's usually not too hard to tell, but it mucks up the search result space. "Featured reviews" for paying customers essentially become a form of paid advertising, but they are not clearly marked as such. That puts them closer to the spam side than the ad side.
- aiiane 14y agoYelp killed off featured reviews a while ago, specifically because they were controversial. It'd be useful if people didn't keep harping on things that aren't even valid anymore.
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- impendia 14y agoA conversation I had with Friend 1, a successful business owner, and Friend 2, a less successful business owner: Friend 1: Have you tried getting some positive reviews on the internet? People really trust them, it really helps to drive business. Friend 2: Oh, really? How many reviews do you have? Friend 1: About twenty. Friend 2: How many of them did you write yourself? Friend 1: (Laughs) About nineteen of them.
- frakkingcylons 14y agoI'm not surprised by this. Writing reviews or mentions yourself or getting others to astroturf for your product is essential to getting started nowadays.
- ebbv 14y agoSadly it's essential because everyone does it. So when you have no reviews as a new business you look really suspicious because you're outside of an artificial norm.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoFalse, and it's opinions like these that let people justify their own dishonesty.
- devgutt 14y agoThis is one of the good things about social networks like Facebook. A review itself doesn't matter unless you know the reviewer.
- timr 14y agoThe problem with these claims is that they all confuse ignorance with malice. These rumors are persistent because they make a sexy story, but they aren't true -- Yelp doesn't manipulate reviews based on advertising. Citing what a Yelp sales rep is alleged to have said to a business owner sounds like compelling evidence, but it's really just garbage: Yelp sales reps have no ability to influence anything, anywhere, no matter what they say or don't say. They're part of a huge team doing a low-pay cold-calling gig -- they make a sale, ring a little bell, and hand in a piece of paper documenting the sale for the bean-counters. That's the extent of their influence with anyone. What's really going on here is some combination of business owners mis-interpreting what a sales rep says, businesses trying to transparently game the system (and whining when it doesn't work -- business owners are amazingly stupid about this!), sales reps saying dumb things (I'm sure this happens occasionally, despite best efforts to control what they say), and the somewhat random nature of an automated review filter. There are tens of thousands of businesses being called by Yelp sales reps every day. Even if 1% of those businesses have reviews randomly filtered on the same day, that's a lot of opportunities for people to see patterns where they don't exist.
- pgrote 14y agoI infer from your comments that there would be no way to prove based on review display that Yelp was providing review relief if you pay for advertising, right? You basically have to trust their algo?
- wahsd 14y agoI would like to remind people that this is not the first or even second time that this kind of claim has flaired up regarding biased reviews, corrupted reviews, purchased reviews, and extortionary practices. I would also caveat though that there is a plausible possibility that this is an attempt at mobbing Yelp. I have always felt that reviews are ripe for disruption and a bit of an ethics and authority treatment.
- illuminate 14y ago"I have always felt that reviews are ripe for disruption and a bit of an ethics and authority treatment." I'd be fascinated to see how someone tries to tackle this better. I post reviews there sometime and see people arguing against their algorithm, but their (imperfect) algorithm is working against a social problem, not a technical problem and that's where persons get confused. "Ethics" is a pretty poor word to use when Yelp is working against the equivalent of or direct SEO-style review spammers. It's hard to tell a real person from a plant.
- raverbashing 14y ago"Yelp’s reviewing process, noting that the company favors consistent reviewers over first timers, in part, to avoid “fake” reviews" Well, this is how it works more or less I've never had a comment on Yelp taken down Well, as other comment says, the problem is the 'idiots'. There's always someone that thinks McD is the epitome of gourmet food and thinks anything that's not overspiced/overMSGd is "bland" There's always someone that thinks that a place with tacky decoration and a queue in front and rude bouncers is "the place to be" So it's really like herding cats.
- astrodust 14y agoCats that love writing reviews that trash a place they don't like, regardless of how quirky their preferences are.
- raverbashing 14y agoYou want to see how the masses think just watch American Idol or a similar show.
- rdl 14y agoI write bad reviews sometimes, but usually include concrete reasons why the place sucks in my review. I find the bad reviews generally are more specific than the good reviews.
- raverbashing 14y agoAnd that's totally ok, after all, not all places are great. But it's one thing to write "OMG this place sux", another is to be specific as you say, like "we waited for 10 minutes until the server appeared and he was rude and the food was chewy"
- roc 14y agoOnly if you're stuck treating people as one homogenous glob. If you let people self-identify by interests (+french food, -foodie, +fine-dining) you can easily get actionable recommendations and minimize noise. The trick is that adding specificity exposes how small your user base is. And when you're dealing with an inherently local industry, even a massive user-base can start to look small when it's sliced up geographically and then by interest.
- pyre 14y agoDown for me now, but the Coral Cache works: http://foodbeast.com.nyud.net/content/2013/04/22/sf-restaurant-calls-out-yelp-for/ http://foodbeast.com.nyud.net/content/2013/04/22/sf-restaura...
- josh2600 14y agoTechnically speaking, there's nothing to stop Yelp from manipulating results within their search engine, just like there's nothing to stop Google. I mean we all think Google doesn't mess with search rankings but we all know they do (see the google blog post about catching Microsoft by inserting fake long-tail search results). In short, does Yelp do this? I don't see why not; there's basically no way for anyone to verify whether Yelp does this unless they get to dive into emails for discovery in a big trial. Then again, I have to think Yelp has enough integrity not to mess with results; but my point is you would never know except through hearsay and gossip. There's no ChillingEffects for Yelp Reviews.
- seekup 14y agoFor the record - I used to be a an Engineering Manager at Yelp, and I've had my Yelp work emails searched in discovery during big lawsuits about the review filter. So did all of my colleagues. The result of all that should speak for itself.
- stefap2 14y agoAnother problem is that people are more compelled to write bad reviews.
- illuminate 14y agoRight. I don't see any problem with INITIAL reviews being held in a queue based on the user's participation level. With more participation reviews get unfiltered. Criticizing Yelp's algorithm is fine, but people don't understand how it actually works, nor do they have the patience to figure it out. Full transparency would be nice, but that would defeat the purpose to having it to screen out the fakers and SEO spammers.
- slashedzero 14y agoWhile I've seen the filtered reviews issue and think the claims are somewhat true, my bigger problem is that yelp does nothing for reviewer quality. So many times, I've seen blatantly false and misleading information tacked on to someone's reviews. The site allows both the microcomments "Food, okay. Waitresses, hot." and the long, trailing rants about how the steak tasted rotten. This is a problem, and not one easily fixed. Being an "Elite Reviewer" just means you give out more idiotic reviews than the rest. Yelp is a joke to anyone who really cares about food.
- illuminate 14y ago"my bigger problem is that yelp does nothing for reviewer quality" What do you expect from user-generated content? "Yelp is a joke to anyone who really cares about food." It's really not. You take the reviews into aggregate, it's very easy to screen out the idiots and fickle eaters. Don't pay attention to the ratings, pay attention to the depictions in the reviews.
- tptacek 14y agoIf you build a business model that knowingly showcases the worst ignorance of an anonymous Internet public, and ask for money to help mitigate the inevitable damage, how is that any different from a protection racket?
- illuminate 14y agoThe algorithm also exists to protect a business from the worst ignorance of an anonymous internet public, it requires participation to avoid being filtered.
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- swayvil 14y agoThis might be a common problem. Forums that, while ostensibly democratic, are actually tailored to suit the forum-owner's agenda. It's done by selective promotion, censorship, filtering, etc. "Boing Boing" is one famous culprit if I recall correctly. The owners argue "it's my forum so I have the right; and besides I'm not censoring I'm unpublishing" or some such nonsense. I'm sure it can get very sneaky. fake democracy.
- mahyarm 14y agoThey should remove the captcha to view filtered reviews.
- babesh 14y agoDon't know if the accusations are true but I would take Yelp reviews with many grains of salt. Its not the truth I question rather its the extreme subjectivity. Some people care about service, some don't; some care about decor, some don't. Different people have different tastes as well as different price sensitivity. Yelp reviewers are also self selecting both in who is more prone to write reviews and under which circumstances that will drive someone to write reviews. So if you really want to figure out how good a place is for you, by all means use Yelp as a resource. But you need to review the reviewers to see what their leanings and expertise are and then read their reviews with that understanding in mind.
- illuminate 14y ago"Its not the truth I question rather its the extreme subjectivity." How do you solve this problem? It's endemic to user-generated content. Of course reviews of everything aren't objective fact. They're inherently skewed by opinion by even the most professional paid reviewer.