Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

Post by palidanx » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 10:35 PM UTC

Guest9081239812 wrote: post #72

majormajor wrote: post #7

Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate. If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street. And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to…

Google Maps is terrible for hiding results. I'll use the filter to show restaurants with a 4.5+ star rating, and it hides dozens of places 4.5+ stars while instead showing results 4.0 - 4.4 stars and even some that have no reviews at all. I find the arrogance insulting. You want to see 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants? Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1…

Post by pests » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 10:43 PM UTC

sjf wrote: post #227

el_benhameen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps is also terrible at showing _only_ relevant info. I searched for “coffee” in a small area earlier today (small because I wanted to walk); it zoomed out to a much larger area and showed me coffee shops along with taquerias, oil change shops, banks, etc. both in the results pane and scattered all over the map. It was such a mess as to be unusable.

Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results. It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish. Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results including ones for Target and McDonald's.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 10:52 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #7

Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate. If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street. And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to…

Post by stevespang » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #7

Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate. If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street. And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to…

Post by treve » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #157

treve wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Yelp in 2018, and the allegations were there, I would be extremely surprised that a secret like this could be kept if it were true. It was generally a pretty open culture which lots internal open cynicism. There was just 0 evidence or even rumors internally this is true. I believe it's way more likely that the system is large enough to generate outliers that believe they're being targeted. However, hyper…

Is it possible that sales reps were using the publication of negative reviews by others as a tip-off of which businesses would then be more likely to purchase the service by which negative reviews could be removed? If so, the timing of those sales pitches along with negative reviews could make it seem like this is what was happening.