If you want to write a good fake review, make sure you trash the place on small things first.
small bar...lighting was too low...but great food and service
;-)
20% of Yelp reviews are fake
21–30 of 110 posts
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#22Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 20% figure represents the percentage of filtered reviews on Yelp. These are reviews that Yelp finds suspicious enough to not publish. Some filtered reviews may be fake, and some might just be false positives. Similarly, Yelp's filter might miss some fake reviews, and end up publishing them. (See http://www.yelp.com/faq#filter_wrong). I hope this makes the distinction between fake and filtered clear.
Our main goal with this paper was to analyze the economic incentives behind review fraud, and for this we used filtered reviews as a proxy for fake reviews. bobf provides a good summary of our key findings so I won't repeat them. For those interested, you can read more here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2293164
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#23Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 20% figure represents the percentage of filtered reviews on Yelp. These are reviews that Yelp finds suspicious enough to not publish. Some filtered reviews may be fake, and some mig…
You might want to rethink that then; I found one of my reviews filtered once, I have also been a "Yelp Elite" member so I am really unclear what criteria they use for the filtering. I also found some clearly fake reviews for the same place where my review was filtered. It was weird that they filtered my review as well because (I think) it was fairly balanced and mostly positive...
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, from the linked paper it looks like 20% is only the percentage of fakes that are statistically obvious.
I know that most people just look at the stars and make a decision. Other people read the good reviews and determine to make their decision from that. I read the bad reviews. 1 to 3 star reviews. I'd rather go to a place with a bifrication of bad and good reviews where the bad reviews are stuff I don't care about... My theory is that if a place sucks it will definitely have bad reviews. A place that is great will sti…
There's no reason that a rival company couldn't fake negative reviews though. I'm sure it's common already.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#25Whenever my dad and I are looking for a place to eat I pull up Yelp. He grumbles about the possibility of fake reviews, but I tell him that as long as you look at the sample size (n=25 or more is usually safe) then you shouldn't have a problem. I've found amazing restaurants (and many other services) through Yelp that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
Sure, there have been times where I've eaten at a highly-rated restaurant and thought to myself that there must have been some positive review fraud at work. At the end of the day I have tried something new, and I still have my whole life ahead of me to try other things. Nothing is forcing me to go back to said restaurant. And I generally leave a review questioning the merits of the establishment.
The positives of Yelp outweigh the negatives and the NYC regulation is a step in the right direction.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#26Does anyone really go by the star ratings on Yelp? I read the reviews but I don't pay any attention to the overall ratings. One of my favorite places to go is a 2-star, and our local Outback is rated a 5.
Plus with the fact that there's no standard, some people rate everything a 4 or 5 star while others reserve a 5 star for the best places in the area (or even the genre) to eat.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#27> There is one site where users share opinions with greater > transparency than Yelp or Google: Facebook. The world’s > biggest social-networking site prohibits the use of fake > names. Facebook isn't that transparent. You can't scrape Facebook.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that 20% of Facebook profiles are fake. About 80% of the friend requests I've received over the last year have been from people I don't know; the majority of which are clearly bots.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#28Whenever my dad and I are looking for a place to eat I pull up Yelp. He grumbles about the possibility of fake reviews, but I tell him that as long as you look at the sample size (n=25 or more is usually safe) then you shouldn't have a problem. I've found amazing restaurants (and many other services) through Yelp that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Sure, there have been times where I've eaten at a highly-rated rest…
Here we go, a good example of an astroturfing comment about Yelp on HN.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#2920% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro's where we were about 80% of the reviews. When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can't resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast. When you combine that with o…
Just out of curiosity, do those "reputation management" companies realize that in serving their clients by making fake reviews, they help destroy end-consumer trust?
In many ways, it's the old SEO argument all over again - gaming a system to increase ratings eventually erodes trust in that system, making those increased ratings less valuable. At the same time, refusing to game the system means your business loses potential eyeballs/customers/etc, so one is left with the old rock vs hard place situation.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#30I've found that Foursquare has a higher signal-to-noise than Yelp for restaurant reviews/tips.