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

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

#281

Post by kromem »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #39
1024core wrote: post #24

> Dean began documenting her findings, starting with serial offenders from the Facebook groups. In a list of 17 people who reviewed SavantCare on Yelp, she found what she called “a suspicious pattern”: 10 of them had reviewed the same dentist’s office in Los Angeles, nine had raved about the same California wedding DJ company and five claimed to have visited the same Mountain View tattoo parlor. Five of the accounts,…

> Hire a high school student with interest in data analysis, and you'll catch these idiots quickly. The calls are coming from inside the house! It's not in Yelp's interests to try to catch this. At least in the short term.

Which turned out to be a terrible idea, because now with the importance of data integrity in training AI all these BS reviews everywhere mean Yelp, Amazon, etc are left with effectively worthless data that otherwise could have created very neat tools and offered a secondary revenue stream to just placement/ads.

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

#282

Post by duskwuff »

Graziano_M wrote: post #212

Seeing the 'Moving company from Florida' triggered me. I was scammed by a moving company from Florida in 2020, and I did a deep dive to look into them and I found huge networks of moving companies, scammers, & reviewers, all in cahoots. I actually managed to get one company's fake reviews removed from google maps, bringing them from a 4.8+ to a 1.x overnight. Within a few months they were back to > 4, but the owners…

Moving companies, locksmiths, plumbers, tow trucks. These businesses all have certain things in common:

1) They work in business sectors which you usually only need rarely, so there's no need to build customer loyalty.

2) But when you do need help from one of these businesses, you need it now. There's little room for a customer to negotiate or shop around.

3) As a result, online advertisements and reviews for these businesses are an utter cesspool. There are very few honest reviews, and it's common for "local" business listings to actually connect you with brokers.

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

#283

Post by smcin »

el_benhameen wrote: post #195
Guest9081239812 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Oil change shops are functionally equivalent to coffee shops for droids. Let us not be exclusionary...

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

#284

Post by kelnos »

The article links to one of her videos where she talks about the owner of a veterinary practice who buys reviews. I brought one of our cats there twice last year for after-hours urgent care, and my experience was -- fortunately -- positive both times. Friends bring their dog there for primary care regularly.

I'm just really wondering why the owner feels the need to do this. Is it a situation where you just have to do it, else you'll get buried under your competitors? Should I expect that our primary vet does this too, and that the other vet practices in our area also do it? Shady either way, but could it be a damned if you do, damned if you don't type thing?

Certainly there are business sectors where there's so much competition that some of them will resort to shady tactics like this to gain customers. But if anything, there's a shortage of vet practices in San Francisco (and the entire bay area, really). Gaining customers here feels like it's more about having available appointments in a reasonable time frame than anything else.

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

#285

Post by freetinker »

JohnFen wrote: post #199
freetinker wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. But then why not just say “no results found”? Because that might give the impression to the “average” user that Google is broken and isn’t solving their problem. To the more sophisticated user, Google is just meddling where they shouldn’t. Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to the average.

Google long ago decided that "No results found" is never an acceptable response. Same with regular Google search. It will just choose arbitrary things to show you instead. It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of these tools.

100%. Couldn’t agree more.

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

#286

Post by fakereviewwatch »

gnicholas wrote: post #2

A bit of a side note, but this is super rare: > Meanwhile, Dean took SavantCare to small claims court over the letter and calls she later received, and won a $275 judgment in March 2018 for “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” NIED claims are nearly impossible to win. In law school we were taught to point them out on issue-spotting questions, but that they were basically unwinnable.

This is an interesting thread, so I thought I'd give some more detail. A few months earlier, my husband and I visited small claims court and had the opportunity to ask a judge if I could bring an emotional distress case there. His response? "Sure you can." We poured through the CACIs and prepared our case for weeks, knowing how difficult it would be to prove. Frankly, I thought we had enough to prove intentional emotional distress, but I was satisfied with getting an award for negligent. Yes, Vikas Kedia and the two head doctors for Savant Care showed up. At the time, I didn't even know that the letter from the lawyer had been forged! Savant Care knew it, though, and hid that fraud in small claims court. Regardless, I still had enough evidence that a psychiatric practice had inflicted emotional distress that I won the case. As the article mentioned, it was about principle, not money. Savant Care eventually paid, but only after we sent them a letter threatening to drag them back to court. Of course, this case only concerned Savant Care's actions toward me, not their fake reviews. Kay

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

#287

Post by pcurve »

kelnos wrote: post #284

The article links to one of her videos where she talks about the owner of a veterinary practice who buys reviews. I brought one of our cats there twice last year for after-hours urgent care, and my experience was -- fortunately -- positive both times. Friends bring their dog there for primary care regularly. I'm just really wondering why the owner feels the need to do this. Is it a situation where you just have to do…

"I'm just really wondering why the owner feels the need to do this."

Everyone knows people who had negative reviewers are more likely to leave reviews, but what people don't often understand is, percentage of people who actually leave ANY review is still exceedingly small. I've heard as long as 1 in a few hundred or even a thousand.

So getting that first few positive ones is critical, to kick off the virtuous cycle of customer acquisition. You'd better deliver though, once customers start coming in.

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

#288

Post by toxicFork »

kelnos wrote: post #284

The article links to one of her videos where she talks about the owner of a veterinary practice who buys reviews. I brought one of our cats there twice last year for after-hours urgent care, and my experience was -- fortunately -- positive both times. Friends bring their dog there for primary care regularly. I'm just really wondering why the owner feels the need to do this. Is it a situation where you just have to do…

It could just be the recommended marketing practice by the local small business school. Right after "Rent a week on the ad spot by the bus station" could be "buy a few fake reviews on yelp".

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

#289

Post by emodendroket »

winrid wrote: post #80
emodendroket wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what the article describes at all so I’m curious what documentation you are referring to.

There are so many people complaining about the sales people doing this stuff. https://youtu.be/C67Lh4LE5LY

I would believe individual salespeople might do unscrupulous things like enlist their friends to leave bad reviews or make promises they can't keep about altering someone's score but that's a totally different accusation than saying Yelp as a company has a policy of doing this.

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

#290

Post by moneywoes »

bombcar wrote: post #257
Fogest wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, a local pub used to give large portion sizes on in person or takeout orders. Then one day we ordered and it was like half the size as normal but of course the same price. Thought it was maybe just a fluke so we gave them a second chance. Unfortunately the portions will still the same smaller size. I proceeded to update my review to indicate the change in portion sizes with the same price. However I noticed many…

An Apple Maps review system that tied in with Apple Pay and could weight based on visits, etc would be wonderful.

Do they open up that purchase data at all? Seems answer is no

The other option is using a bank api but seems too much friction..

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