111–120 of 166 posts
Is anyone surprised that a recommendation site that gets its money from the businesses is less than honest? Is anyone surprised that when they get popular they turn into a protection racket?
Say it with me. "If you're not paying, you're the product." Or in this case, the club.
Personally I just Yelp would have some sort of collaborative filtering engine. They kind of have a social one, but my friends' opinions are often as bad as a random stranger's. What people review on Yelp is subjective and Yelp makes it hard to filter out people's biases because of their one dimensional rating system. When people review a restaurant, they review the service, the food, the atmosphere and the overall va…
Do you think that you would see better results if Yelp was able to use a collaborative filtering approach to somehow personalize their results such that they more closely match your tastes and preferences - based on other users' data?
I have a friend that works as a veterinarian. Yelp called his business often to try to get an advertising deal. After he declined, many of his 5 star reviews disappeared from the site. After losing a lot of business, he signed up for the advertising. The next day all of the 5 star reviews returns. This was just a few months ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not worth mentioning. Almost every case has been a coincidence and they've gone out of their way to explain the review filter (which functions similarly to Google's PageRank algorithm and attempts to filter out spammy reviews using various factors). Each court case related to this has been thrown out. If you trust Google to be fair with PageRank then there hasn't been any evidence that should make you more conce…
I'm very suspicious of your review of Yelp. > Business owners complain about getting demoted in Google's PageRank algorithm quite a bit, too. Google rankings fluctuate over time, but it is never the result of a direct targeting of an individual company or URL by google, whereas there is ample evidence that Yelp directly targets individual businesses depending on whether or not they are paying customers.
Yelp's filtered reviews fluctuate as well. Reviews that are filtered can be unfiltered if the system decides the reviews aren't actually spam.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I swear by AngiesList for services like moving companies. They just called us up a couple weeks ago and sat on the phone for over a half hour (because we were willing) taking reviews from us on a bunch of companies that we had used. This is why it costs money; they actually provide a service. If they don't have enough reviews, they hire people to call you up and write up the reviews for you.
Yea, but they were the first ones to restart advertising with Rush Limbaugh. And their system is just as game-able, albeit at a slight cost.
The Limbaugh thing is unfortunate, that's true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews. But a continuous, consistent pattern of one-shot negative reviews is also not particularly difficult for a competing business (or anyone with a grudge) to reproduce. This is a hard problem, and I don't think the credit check-style identity verification questions suggested in the post are going to solve it. For one thing, I think an ove…
Why would they find it creepy? You wouldn't need to say your using credit history. It would be as simple as asking the user a question "Please validate your a real person by answering these few questions". As far as the user is concerned it's just a few questions and answers.
Just a few questions and answers that could hint at all kinds of things including relationship status, orientation, race, financial status, etc. Imagine if some stranger on the street, or even the cashier at a trendy retail store, asks you about some detail they have no business knowing. You would find it creepy. Now imagine it's some random web site (which is all Yelp is to most people).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a shamless plug, but I work on mobile apps at Fodor's Travel. We've been doing print travel guides for 75 years. We now have apps, in addition to books. We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops, hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have our hip moments). So in a way,…
Huh, interesting, and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Fodor's. I work at http://www.oyster.com/ -- we're kind of the anti-TripAdvisor as all hotels are visited and photographed by our pro photographers and reviewers. We've found the same thing with UGC in the hotel space. For the popular hotels on TripAdvisor, there are 1000s of reviews, and the aggregate rating is always 3-4 stars. In contrast, on Oyster.com there's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, but they were the first ones to restart advertising with Rush Limbaugh. And their system is just as game-able, albeit at a slight cost.
It's a pretty expensive undertaking. You have to be a subscriber (at non-trivial cost) to be a member/reviewer. The vendor would have to create multiple puppet accounts at $20/pop to shill up reviews. But, what of all the other actual reviewers that will write bad ones? You tend to see patterns in the reviews and, when a shining review of a vendor leaves me skeptical, I always look at the members' other reviews to se…
Disclaimer: I don't work for Yelp but I have created other user-ratings-based sites before. It's not entirely fair to criticize Yelp for under-emphasizing negative reviews. One of the big hurdles to overcome on a user ratings site is that people are most motivated to write reviews when they are outraged. There is a massive selection bias, and if nothing is done to alleviate this, your site runs the risk of becoming a…
I do agree that a lot of valid reviews are being thrown out with the bathwater. There should be a better mechanism to show all unfiltered reviews. The thing that Yelp that makes it stand above other review sites is that they incentive positive reviews. Like Yelp or not, the idea of "Yelp Elite" is actually a great idea, because it is able to draw out a lot of medium to great reviews, stuff you would rarely see on oth…
What's tricky about it now? Click "X filtered" reviews and you can read to your heart's content.