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Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

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Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#21

Post by jcdrepair »

yoda_sl wrote: post #9

That particular topic about Yelp and their reviews have been discussed many times on HN. Yelp is a major scam company that absolutely do not care about the business owner. They are in it for the money -doh- and what matters for them is Page Views, and regular users posting more reviews, thus more page views. Their filtering system is a total mess but since it is a secret on how it works they can say whatever they wan…

The bottom line is that, depending on your business, it can take a long time to build up a good list of non-filtered ads. After 4+ years of asking customers to write reviews of our service, our business has 63 5-star reviews and about 83 filtered reviews. We have a lot of happy customers and a lot of them create a Yelp account just to review us and then never use it again. I totally understand Yelp filtering these out.

Unless you're a restaurant or some other establishment frequented by the Yelping community, there's no silver bullet to getting a lot of great reviews. It takes time and probably more than half of the ones you get will be filtered.

That said, I think it's foolish of pretty much everyone to use Yelp ads. They're a complete scam but that's a different topic.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#22

Post by periferral »

crikli wrote: post #10

I keep seeing articles like this. I read the article, then I find the company on Yelp and read through the reviews. Every single time it's been very clear that Yelp is telling these businesses that they have a problem. But rather than acting on this extraordinarily valuable feedback the owners/managers react by blaming Yelp for the bad reviews or accusing Yelp of hiding the good reviews. This behavior frequently expo…

You presumably work at Yelp? This isn't a case of killing the messenger. This is a case where the company wants business owners to conform to its way to dealing with spam rather than have its engineers come up with a better solution to the problem

Read this very well written article on the problem and possible solution and maybe you'll have a better idea of the problem at hand.

http://justinvincent.com/page/1874/yelp-you-cost-me-2000-by-...

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#23

Post by bguthrie »

aaronsw wrote: post #3

This is a pretty crummy article. If you read it carefully, you see: - a woman owns a shady company - she tries to get her friends to write five star reviews of her on Yelp - Yelp intentionally tries to filter out these reviews so the site isn't filled with spam opinions - the woman is upset The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.

Yes, it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that Yelp is filtering fly-by-night reviewers "for no good reason."

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#25

Post by crikli »

periferral wrote: post #22
crikli wrote: post #10

I keep seeing articles like this. I read the article, then I find the company on Yelp and read through the reviews. Every single time it's been very clear that Yelp is telling these businesses that they have a problem. But rather than acting on this extraordinarily valuable feedback the owners/managers react by blaming Yelp for the bad reviews or accusing Yelp of hiding the good reviews. This behavior frequently expo…

You presumably work at Yelp? This isn't a case of killing the messenger. This is a case where the company wants business owners to conform to its way to dealing with spam rather than have its engineers come up with a better solution to the problem Read this very well written article on the problem and possible solution and maybe you'll have a better idea of the problem at hand. http://justinvincent.com/page/1874/yelp…

No, I don't work at Yelp. I don't think I even know anyone who knows anyone who works there or works for their VC investors.

And I'm not saying that a problem doesn't exists: I'm saying that *within the scope of my experience( the complaints about Yelp have been more about owners/managers not wanting to deal with something that sucks about their business.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#26

Post by andrewcross »

aaronsw wrote: post #3

This is a pretty crummy article. If you read it carefully, you see: - a woman owns a shady company - she tries to get her friends to write five star reviews of her on Yelp - Yelp intentionally tries to filter out these reviews so the site isn't filled with spam opinions - the woman is upset The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.

Agreed. Not to say there isn't a problem with Yelp's practices (as have been documented elsewhere), but this article does not make a good case against them.

From an algorithmic standpoint, filtering out reviews from new users makes sense. Otherwise you'll get the owner and friends stuffing in good reviews.

Just look at what the data might look like for the 17 people. -They all sign up in a period of a few weeks. -They all review this one place and nothing else. -16 of the 17 never sign back in again.

It's pretty clear that it's a blatant rating stuff, so filter it out. Again, I'm not saying that the algorithm is perfect, but it makes sense to at least filter out these reviews.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#27

Post by qdpb »

brianjyee wrote: post #8
aaronsw wrote: post #3

This is a pretty crummy article. If you read it carefully, you see: - a woman owns a shady company - she tries to get her friends to write five star reviews of her on Yelp - Yelp intentionally tries to filter out these reviews so the site isn't filled with spam opinions - the woman is upset The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.

The article says she asked her customers to post genuine reviews. I don't know if that's true but if it is, I see nothing shady about asking your customers to post reviews. There is definitely a conflict of interest on Yelp's side, but I don't see a good solution to the spam problem.

Yelp specifically mentions that this would lead to blacklisting of comments in their help, for the reasons of resulting bias (you only ask customers who are happy, you might provide a discount or preferential treatment etc).

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#28

Post by neovive »

This does demonstrate the value of third-party "professional" reviews (e.g. Consumer Reports, Zagat) and a big reason why Google bought Zagat -- the trust factor.

You never know if personal reviews on various sites were driven by ulterior motives. Although it's likely that the majority of personal reviews are genuine, you should try not to be swayed by just a few reviews without further research.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#29

Post by kip_ »

valuegram wrote: post #15
yoda_sl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you have not been running a small business. Some reviews are posted from time to time by people that are not even customers or stopped by the business; for some dumb reason they post a 1 star review.. And that review usually stick and doesn't get filtered out...but other reviews from true customers posting 4 to 5 stars reviews disappear usually in less than 24 hours after they were posted. What kind of explan…

I can vouch that this exact scenario has happened to one of my small businesses. Multiple reviews from actual customers are filtered out, but a negative review from someone who has never interacted with our organization is displayed normally.

Were your actual customers regular users of Yelp who have reviewed other businesses actively?

We can pick apart Yelp's model and likely should, but it does appear to discount "drive-by" Yelpers who only sign up to give a good review to a single business.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#30

Post by crusso »

aaronsw wrote: post #3

This is a pretty crummy article. If you read it carefully, you see: - a woman owns a shady company - she tries to get her friends to write five star reviews of her on Yelp - Yelp intentionally tries to filter out these reviews so the site isn't filled with spam opinions - the woman is upset The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.

> The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.

You also have to wonder why HN upvoted it so that it appears in the top 5 threads.

The news story is probably just looking for a sensationalist headline that will get them hits.

What's our excuse? :)

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