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Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#131

Post by spaznode »

yoda_sl wrote: post #116
spaznode wrote: post #61

I don't really like to admit it, but anyone who thinks it's just the "poor old algorithm" doing what it thinks is fair is misinformed. Part of my core day job work involves identifying real vs not real people and also uses the same technology to drive everything - lucene. An algorithm that refuses to attempt identification beyond what data yelp itself stores is clearly in denial of the "mountain" of data available on…

Hi spaznode, I will be really curious to hear more about your approach for doing a better filtering. Feel free to contact me (contact info/web site on my profile).

Not sure what you mean..rtfm

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#132

Post by mikeleeorg »

mcantelon wrote: post #49
mikeleeorg wrote: post #34

In case you want to dig in deeper, Frank Brader's dog business on Yelp now has 4 stars from 5 reviews: http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini... Justin G, the negative reviewer, was a Yelp Elite member from 2006-2008: http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

I'd get rid of the punitive filtering too if negative press came out. I wonder if "Elite" indicates paid? Yelp does pay, or has paid in the past, some reviewers.

A friend of mine committed himself to get Elite status one year. He did it too, by writing hundreds of reviews. Though he tried making most of them pretty funny, he eventually switched to a strategy that emphasized quantity over quality, because he didn't feel he was getting there with just high-quality reviews. Surprisingly, this seemed to work, though perhaps his multitude of reviews were genuinely useful enough.

He didn't get paid for any of this either. It was just for the parties, grand openings, and extra-special treatment at restaurants.

I don't have any way of verifying these accounts, but I see a couple of stories about Yelp paying (non-Elite) reviewers to write reviews:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives...

There's also a thread on Yelp about a supposed popular paid reviewer too:

http://www.yelp.com/topic/redding-paid-reviewers-suck

I recall reading somewhere that when Yelp started, they seeded their database with paid reviews as well, to surmount that chicken-and-egg problem of new social networks & review services. I wouldn't consider that a negative mark against them though.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#133

Post by mikeleeorg »

jclemenson wrote: post #56
cletus wrote: post #4

This raises several important issues. The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes. This has several important implications. - It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both…

I question the value of social search in general. It doesn't matter what your friends like. What matters is what others with similar tastes like. The only good thing about social search is the context informed by the relationships.

> What matters is what others with similar tastes like.

Yes. Exactly. And it depends. Some friends have very different tastes than I - and sometimes that's exactly why they are my friends (who wants homogenous friends?).

For some items, I want to know what others with similar tastes like - like restaurants, for instance. A friend of mine loves fried food; me, not so much. But a stranger who likes healthy food may know of an unpopular restaurant none of my friends know of. That is exactly the kind of restaurant I would want surfaced in a good social search for restaurants.

For news articles, I would want the opposite. I don't necessarily want people with similar tastes to recommend articles to me. I'd rather read conflicting views across the gamut of the argument, so I can make my own (hopefully) informed decision. Again, friends aren't as good a source of such articles as strangers would be.

And to make it more complicated, that's just my preference. Someone else might prefer people with similar tastes instead.

I definitely agree that the context informed by the relationships is the key to social search - sometimes it's someone similar to you, other times, it's not.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#134

Post by suking »

akashs wrote: post #102
jeremymims wrote: post #84

It's easy to come down against Yelp, but small businesses have been trying to "game" Yelp in unsophisticated ways for some time. We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be subm…

TL;DR: You're wrong. And you sound like someone from Yelp trying to "game the system" and write positive reviews about yourself. Maybe PG's algorithms should censor you without any evidence? -------------- My parents had the exact same experience as in the article. - A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from custome…

sounds as bad as the BBB.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#135

Post by rorrr »

bkbleikamp wrote: post #129
rorrr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how do you explain this? http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...

I am not sure what you mean. Why would filtered reviews distribution match up to the unfiltered reviews? Typically a "fake" review is either going to be someone who is raving about a business to try to boost the rating or someone who for some reason wants to bad mouth the business (e.g. a competitor) so it makes sense that 1 and 5 star ratings are the most filtered.

Read it again. The distribution of filtered reviews doesn't match between average and the one for Yelp itself. Clearly doctored.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#136

Post by ShannonO »

pagefruit wrote: post #68

Yelp's filtering algorithm is terrible. Purely anecdotal, but: I've tried writing reviews on Yelp several times. When I first started reviewing and my reviews were getting filtered out, I'd think "OK, maybe I just need to continue reviewing and eventually Yelp will realize I'm not a faker". After about 20 reviews (spread over a couple weeks, most of which still remain flagged), I got pissed and gave up. How does Amaz…

Amazon (and app stores, for that matter) have a huge advantage in that they can verify that the reviewer is at least a customer. Amazon differentiates these reviewers visually in the reviews. Yelp cannot take this verification step.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#138

Post by pbreit »

yoda_sl wrote: post #113
bkbleikamp wrote: post #111

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—i…

It's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it. I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads. Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is f…

It's not hard at all to believe that businesses would complain about a review site that is working perfectly. Would you be willing o disclose your parents' business so hat we can analyze the hidden reviews?

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#139

Post by pbreit »

bugsy wrote: post #123

#1 Yep, Yelp is still a total scam despite their claims of reform everytime they get publicity about their criminal behavior. For those who ask "What crimes?", among their crimes are extortion and fraud. Deleting genuine positive reviews if you don't pay them, and deleting negative reviews if you do is simply not legitimate: there is no defense for it; the only explanation possible is that it is an extortion racket.…

You make serious allegations not supported by facts.

#3 The new reviews were obviously written in response to the article. Three of them actually reference it!

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#140

Post by pbreit »

huhtenberg wrote: post #120
pbreit wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. "Where your Public Comment will appear Your comment will appear directly following the review that you've commented on." https://biz.yelp.com/support/responding_to_reviews

"Wrong?" GP's comment said "The obvious thing to do for the guy is to post a note ... on his website" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959702 - that's the context.

Wrong. I was replying to this comment: "I would expect that the note is then buried or removed under Yelp's labyrinthine terms of service."

I unfortunately cannot downvote your reply.

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