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Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

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Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#251

Post by patentatt »

dmart wrote: post #193
donmcronald wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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. Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.

It’s gotten to a point where for some topics I don’t even regard ‘the internet’ as a realistic source for information. Which is a tragedy, because it used to be. Almost anything related to health or medical topics, or consumer electronics is so inundated with blog spam that the signal to noise ratio is just too low to be useful. So many times I find myself 1/4 the way down an ‘article’ about a topic only to realize it’s nothing but regurgitated ‘content marketing’ spam.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#252

Post by PixyMisa »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #166
underwater wrote: post #136

Earlier 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…

Google created comment spam.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#254

Post by dqv »

nativeit-net wrote: post #180
tartoran wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Yelp can easily expose businesses to people who are more likely to give bad reviews too.

I mean they collect this data on every profile - some reviewers have a TON of 1 star reviews. Hide the restaurants that pay and increase exposure of those that don’t to these reviewers to get them to give poor ratings.

Obviously there is no way to prove this, but it would be a great way to get people to pay while still maintaining plausible deniability. After all, the one star reviewers still have to go to the establishment and have their bad experience.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#257

Post by ffpip »

bruceb wrote: post #174
jaryd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

'DDG' is mentioned too many times on HN. They will just get spam.

Maybe just a coincidence.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#258

Post by ineedasername »

nkrisc wrote: post #240

Keep it simple: I kept a basket of takeout menus from my favorite neighborhood restaurants in the kitchen. Call the number on the takeout menu. In the event you call and your menu is out of date, it's a minor inconvenience and you'll grab a new one when you go get your food. I never had a restaurant give me trouble because I had an old menu, usually they were happy I'd been a customer so long I had an old menu. New r…

Pretty much every restaurant has a website these days. I go there. If they offer direct delivery, I use it. If they don't, they usually link to the grubhub etc. service they use, and I order there. At least then I know the restaurant was a fully consenting partner in the revenue share agreement.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#259

Post by proverbialbunny »

pomian wrote: post #244
proverbialbunny wrote: post #45

Does anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about: - Open Now (Optional) - Sort by Rating - Search by food category, not name of restaurant. Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost…

TripAdvisor

Thanks for the reply. Any idea how to sort by rating? It's not giving me the option and is recommending food I'm allergic to. I searched for Mexican and got, Chili's, Chipotle, and Taco Bell, instead of listing hole in the wall places near by me, which are the restaurants I can eat at.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#260

Post by ip26 »

bichiliad wrote: post #112

I 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…

It just hit me- this rings of an "SEO racket"!

perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it

The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering

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