Usually 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.
Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
171–180 of 300 posts
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#172Wait 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?
> 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 a…
When 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.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.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created . > In the old days we had paid search engines I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engin…
It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web.
Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet.
I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Facebook as the internet to the point its where they consume most of their information.
I screamed about all this when Google became an ad machine. I screamed about it when Microsoft released paid DLC for the Xbox 360. Some of us railed, but the children...the children grew up thinking it was all normal and now its just 'how the world is' (SAAS/advertising/misinformation)
That's the real danger here. Companies outlast us and mold the next generation to see them as Deities of the world wide web.
Also- I do not remember paid search engines either.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#174It 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
We actually moved to TripAdvisor a few months ago.
Wow, you answered 2 minutes after this question was asked. Does DDG have something setup to notify them when DDG is mentioned on HN?
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#175I 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 i…
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect.
Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.
I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.
TLDR; You need more people involved.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#176This 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.
The "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
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created . > In the old days we had paid search engines I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engin…
> In March 2004, Yahoo launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites were guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!
I vaguely recall paying something like $20 for that back in the day. It's not technically a paid search engine I guess, but I wonder what the effect would be currently if there were some type of nominal fee required for all search placement. I think it would make it more difficult to generate massive amounts of blogspam.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. 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 po…
>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 confr…
> And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
It's even worse than that, because it's so hard to tell if this is even happening.
Suppose guidance counselors in predominantly black schools are telling kids to focus on athletics and the ones in predominantly white schools tell them to focus on intellectual extracurriculars. Then a resume parser sorts people with athletics listed into physical jobs and people with intellectual pursuits listed into intellectual jobs, which of course results in the black applicants getting callbacks for the lower paying jobs.
This is pretty clearly the guidance counselors causing the disparity rather than the algorithm, but we only know that because it was stipulated in the hypothetical. In real life you may not have enough data to be able to discern the underlying cause. In other words, you don't know what the baseline racial disparity is based on all of the non-racial factors that correlate with race, so you don't know if the problem is in the algorithm or was caused somewhere upstream and the algorithm is only producing the accurate outputs for its inputs.
In theory you can evaluate this by checking up on how the candidates hired do compared to how the algorithm predicted they would do, but that's a noisy signal (what does "doing well" mean?), you might not have a large enough sample size to get meaningful results, and it has a lag time of potentially several years, by which point you may already be using a different algorithm. It's a hard problem.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#179I 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 i…
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
SEO is a racket. Google controls >90% of the search engine market, globally.
That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open.
The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
While 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 rea…
I'm in no way defending anything google here, I was just stating that Yelp if as bad is not worse than google (as they are more desperate for revenue). And I have no incentive to lie, the anecdote was something that happened to a close friend of mine and know what kind of distress it caused. I have no idea if their corporate strategy is to " extort ", but from noticing other incidents they're not too far off. Their a…
I will have to do some searching to grab a screen cap, but I can tell you that Yelp explicitly advertised a paid "feature" to small businesses like mine to hide competitors from top search results in exchange for a fee. I don't know that empirical proof of systemic abusive behavior and antitrust violations would necessarily be useful here. They are clearly employing tactics that actively damage open competition and informed consumer choice, and even anecdotal evidence of that is justification for regulatory movement to stop it.