Yelp Increasing Transparency and Eliminating 'Favorite Review'

Post by aeontech » Tue, Apr 06, 2010, 10:47 AM UTC

ben1040 wrote: post #10

aeontech wrote: post #9

Still no way to request a manual review though. I already see several good detailed reviews by people that I know personally that have been flagged. As well as reviews filtered for businesses that I know personally and know for a fact that they don't pay anyone for reviews. From initial appearance, looks like a lot of innocent reviews get caught in the filter.

I looked around at some of the filtered reviews for restaurants I frequent. For the vast majority I couldn't find anything wrong with them other than that they were penned by users with less than 5-10 reviews. I can understand why they don't offer any sort of manual review -- how is a staffer who has never patronized that business capable of determining if a review is spam or legit? I wonder if it would be any better…

Post by ben1040 » Tue, Apr 06, 2010, 5:40 PM UTC

aeontech wrote: post #11

ben1040 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked around at some of the filtered reviews for restaurants I frequent. For the vast majority I couldn't find anything wrong with them other than that they were penned by users with less than 5-10 reviews. I can understand why they don't offer any sort of manual review -- how is a staffer who has never patronized that business capable of determining if a review is spam or legit? I wonder if it would be any better…

Well, the other weird thing that I see is that the reviews that have been filtered, are overwhelmingly highly positive. Which leads me to think that while their spam filter is agressive in filtering positive reviews, it is still vulnerable to businesses posting negative reviews about each other. Maybe that's just my limited sample size though.