271–280 of 300 posts
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I too would like to know what you use. I hate using Yelp for the obvious reasons, but I don't have an alternative.
I use Google Maps.
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> the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on. (The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burr…
And remember that receipts aren't for you. In fact, it might cost them money because it facilitates returns. Businesses don't care if they give you a receipt. They care if a receipt was generated by the machine, and are a check on the employee. those signs "if we didn't give you a receipt your meal is free" take on a different meaning in that light.
In my country, the cash register of every company that makes over x amount of annual revenue is connected via the internet to the taxman.
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> 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…
The crazy thing is to prevent search engines from indexing it (and getting sued for false billing) they rendered the number in an image-that-looks-like-text instead of text. I wonder if they are doing anything to prevent indexing of these false numbers or if they just don’t care now.
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Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
For me, the shady business practices are not the reason I don't use Yelp. The big problem is that people are bad at reviewing restaurants. Everyone has different assumptions and standards, so the rating is generally meaningless. I see things like "1 Star. Server gave me a dirty look after I didn't tip them, because I don't believe in tipping." In cases like that, the problem is you, not the restaurant! For things as…
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Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
What do you use, if you don't mind sharing? My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is. While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.
The term evolved well before the current “tracking” lingo.
The more usual examples included yellow pages ads featuring phone numbers that forwarded to the businesses and allowed publishers to count how many “leads” were sent. Apartment listings magazines used these extensively, car ads, etc. - pretty much anything print or direct response web.
While Yelps use case may raise ire, the base tech and many of the implementations definitely are not intended to device. For a long time, most were toll-free numbers, as local numbers were too expensive, especially before VoIP became ubiquitous.
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…
- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.
- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.
- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.
- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
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> 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 is so entwined with the web that they've changed how people interact with and publish content. Deep browsing sessions through layers of hyperlinks are dead. Instead people jump into and out of pages from Google, Twitter or HN. Personal home pages are dead, instead you need to publish to a platform like Medium or Twitter which will promote your content for you because no one is browsing anymore. Now we have a w…
30% of the links in the top 30 on HN were personal home pages. (your number might be different since they change often)
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> They care if a receipt was generated by the machine, and are a check on the employee. Aren't receipts used to track the store's revenue, as in the numbers reported to your local tax agency? As far as I know, it's common for cashiers to have a daily/weekly/monthly slack value that they are allowed to report as a difference between the number reported by cash registers and the amount of cash delivered, because SNAFUs…
This could be stored on a computer now, though. But numbers can be fudged. Taiwan had an interesting way around this with a receipt lottery. Ask for a receipt, it has a number on it that enters you in a lottery. Presumably the generation of this number means the sale was reported. https://guidetotaipei.com/article/taiwan-receipt-lottery-%E7...
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/02/28/g...