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Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

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Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#121

Post by _delirium »

benhoyt wrote: post #106
gdilla wrote: post #68

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…

> I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Fodor's

Man, I'm 30 and this makes me feel old. :) In the print travel guides market, it's one of the big names. It comes from the generation before the more backpacker-oriented guides (Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, etc.) and targets more of an upper-middle-class family vacation type of audience, but it's still fairly popular, within the print-travel-guides space.

It does seem that their move into digital guides is quite recent and incomplete, though.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#122

Post by exue »

Despite all its flaws, Yelp is the best solution I've had for finding good restaurants and other services. I love being able to read reviews by locals I might randomly see, browse through their profiles and see what else they like. In the vast majority of cases the crowdsourced reviews are awesome. Unfortunately their verification and filtering system is weak, and needs major improvement (an identity verification program would be awesome). Yelp is still a great service overall, and the fact that I use it over ZAGAT or anything else tells you a lot about how effective it is.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#123

Post by hncommenter13 »

jv22222 wrote: post #7
simonw wrote: post #3

The proposed solution sounds incredibly easy to game - as a moving company, I could create a bunch of fake, one-off profiles with complaints about one of my competitors and destroy their Yelp reputation. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible for an algorithm to detect the difference between a bunch of angry one-time posters and a coordinated reputation attack. This is why I've gone off sites like Yelp for recomm…

You need a valid, fully qualified, unique credit history for each new account. How is that easy to game? Are you assuming that the moving company will get all their employees to to signup to Yelp and certify their credit history against fake sock puppet accounts? They maybe able to do it for a few accounts but pretty soon they would run out of real people to use up... in the mean time real reviews will be submitted b…

Say what? Yelp is pulling credit histories of people who join the site? If they are, that is way out of bounds for what users typically expect when joining an online review site. As a simple reviewer, I'm not engaging in any business with them, they're not offering me credit, and pulling a credit report on some anonymous internet user would not only be expensive but would require some serious disclosure (as having credit reports pulled actually impacts one's credit score). Not only that, but if they are doing it, it doesn't seem to be working very well.

Besides, I never supplied sufficient information for Yelp to connect me to my credit report without doing some seriously ethically questionable data mining.

Why do you believe that Yelp does this? If so, that would be more surprising to most users than the pay-for-play behavior we're seeing here.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#124

Post by chris_wot »

twoodfin wrote: post #109
mistermann wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...whereas there is ample evidence that Yelp directly targets individual businesses depending on whether or not they are paying customers. Can you link to any of this "ample evidence"? Preferably not just allegations from business owners who don't like their reviews.

Not sure if there s ample evidence, but there is something very fishy going on with the reviews the article has pointed out. I won't be using Yelp!

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#125

Post by Sivart13 »

What's most shocking at this point is that this story has been up for seven hours and Yelp hasn't bothered to fix the page in question, the wrongness of which could be observed by any human with eyes: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor...

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#126

Post by rush-tea »

Like what everyone is saying, Yelp review system is very easy to game. Just create a one off profile, and hype the business. Yelp algorithm only allows good reviews getting posted while the bad ones are buried. Why? Because good reviews generate traffic to Yelp which in turn help Yelp getting money from advertiser.

Five stars review system is flawed.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#127

Post by aperrien »

TylerE wrote: post #65
mcknz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1995 corollary: the is invariably a brother- or sister-in-law.

Not always a bad thing. All but the worst of the worst are going not want to screw over a relative, even a distant one.

Not always true. People look guard and abuse their own first. "Exploitation begins at home"

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#128

Post by jv22222 »

Sivart13 wrote: post #125

What's most shocking at this point is that this story has been up for seven hours and Yelp hasn't bothered to fix the page in question, the wrongness of which could be observed by any human with eyes: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor...

I couldn't agree more. It seems amazing that with thousands of eyeballs on this there has been no effort made to fix it.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#129

Post by sbochins »

edw519 wrote: post #22

1995 Q: How can you verify the quality of a ? A: Ask your . 2009 Q: Same question. A: Don't need no stinkin' people. We have the internets! 2012 Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it? A: Use the 1995 solution.

No need for the 1995 solution, Yelp is just doing a very bad job at detecting bad reviews. It's usually rule #1 that in any type of "bad" user filtering that many people that are good users may not engage your site.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#130

Post by jv22222 »

steve8918 wrote: post #84
pavel_lishin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yelp wouldn't get your SSN; they'd only get a boolean response as to whether you're an actual human being or not.

Unless, of course, Yelp or whoever else used the service also ran a man-in-the-middle and captured the information being passed back and forth.

SSN would not need to be involved at any point during a question based verification process.
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