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What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
Google Maps? I mean, it's not perfect, the reviews aren't great, but usually anything rated 4.5+ is at least solid and they don't mess around with restaurant phone numbers.
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Probably a very dumb question. Why do sites like Yelp/Quora try very hard to force you to use the app instead of the web site? Isn't it easier to make money on ads on the web? In the Yelp app I don't get any ads. I may be more likely to browse longer in the app I guess.
Ignoring advertising for a moment, mobile apps are first-class clients, whereas mobile websites frequently aren't. Mobile websites are usually stripped-down experiences, and the company doesn't want to invest the effort in turning the mobile website into a first-class client because most of the users are on the mobile app. It's easier to just funnel people into the app, which is also much more likely to get the user…
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"Something else" indeed. Recently a scam site popped up that copied the branding of our site, autotempest.com. (They registered autoStempest.com and copied our logos and such.) They claimed to be a dealership based in Texas, but were actually posting fake vehicles and having people wire them money (which they obviously kept). One of the things these scammers did to appear legit was set up a Yelp page with a bunch of…
What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
It's something I've wanted to do for awhile. Do Things that idk yelp does like give older ratings less weight.
I also think the the ratings are mostly useless. 4 1/2 star restaurants in the same area are not comparable. The rounding to half puts restaurants that are miles apart to close together. Ratings below 3 are useless. Sushi in sf is frustrating with yelp. Michelin stared restaurants have the same ratings as local sushi places. The whole scale needs to be used. There also needs to be separate ratings for food and service. Places get hit hard for unreasonable service expectations when the food is great. I'm pretty sure the average yelp reviewer has crap taste in food. Especially in tourist areas.
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value. In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced…
That isn't to say that I don't think Yelp's behavior here is gross, but the broader picture you paint of pure middleman rent extraction with no value created, eg with:
> The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant.
Is circular in that you assume your conclusion and then point to it as evidence.
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What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
It's a network effect. Readers go to databases with the most data, and creators / reviewers go to the places with the best 'audience'. Same reason why it's been a very long and hard road to replace craigslist for many things.
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What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
Google Maps? I mean, it's not perfect, the reviews aren't great, but usually anything rated 4.5+ is at least solid and they don't mess around with restaurant phone numbers.
I've found Google Maps review quality and quantity improved over the last few years so it's rare that I'd even open Yelp in recent months. With this, I'm deleting my Yelp app.
When I used to use Yelp, I found the reviews are so hard to wade though. So many: - I had a bad time .. once. - This restaurant isn't as good as this other place that is twice as expensive. - We had to wait a "long time". - The food sucked (because they don't like the kind of food they serve...). - This place sucks and you should go to this other completely different place.
For me finding good restaurants is still a trial and error process that technology can't improve on.
An interesting technical detail: they made the phone numbers gifs so they wouldn’t be indexed by search engines.
I could be misremembering details and I can’t find anything online, but I’m pretty sure this happened.
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Also "the staff is so RUDE!". Any review which uses the word "rude" can be safely ignored, because it's written by the kind of person who considers it rude that his/her water glass went unfilled for nearly 30 seconds after being emptied.
I always wonder about that, like who is the rude person... really hard to know. I don't think I've ever encountered "rude" staff. Maybe just dumb luck but it's just not something that has occurred to me where I thought that.
Like you, I basically never have encountered a restaurant employee that I would say is rude.
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I just turn around and go to Google’s reviews.
Google also sells your direct links to "Buy Tickets" and your phone number to 3rd party affiliates that will take a cut without your permission. I've been fighting for almost a year to get links in our profile pointed back to our website for a website with more than 1 Million hits a year and a 30k Google Ad spend.
I have no idea how to actually do this, I just remember seeing a link asking if I own this or that business on maps, I guess when it is unclaimed?