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

justinvincent.com

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

#151

Post by beej71 »

underwater wrote: post #20

I don't know if he's just being coy by saying this is an accident on Yelp's part. The actual reviews are here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor... . It's pretty obvious there is something fishy about the unfiltered reviews. Each reviewer first left a one line review "Amazing!!! one of a kind..one of the best sushi place" and "the best of the best" before their very detailed, glowing review…

That's literally jawdropping for me. I would have thought it a fantastic business... and then to find that all the filtered reviews are 1 star... unreal.

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

#152

Post by jonknee »

ceejayoz wrote: post #141
jonknee wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What's tricky about it now? Click "X filtered" reviews and you can read to your heart's content.

After you fill out a totally unnecessary captcha that seems to only be there to make some users give up at that point.

The captcha is there so people don't scrape the filtered reviews (be it Google, a browser extension, spammers, etc)

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

#153

Post by orijing »

sliverstorm wrote: post #136
iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services." EXTREMELY worth mentioning. If you've yelped Yelp, so to speak, you know to take their recommendations with a grain of salt and then some. Caveat emptor. While I'm on the topic, the idea of a single company managing reputation for any given space is silly bey…

It'd be great if we had multiple review sites. Problem is nobody has managed to get as many users to write as detailed of reviews as Yelp has.

That made me think of an interesting idea. No problem is not solvable with some level of indirection!

A review aggregator website where the value of reviews from various sources is weighted by how reliable they are. For example, if there is Yelp, Facebook and Google, it can weight a restaurant 0.7 Yelp, 0.2 Facebook and 0.1 Google.

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

#154

Post by ceejayoz »

jonknee wrote: post #152
ceejayoz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After you fill out a totally unnecessary captcha that seems to only be there to make some users give up at that point.

The captcha is there so people don't scrape the filtered reviews (be it Google, a browser extension, spammers, etc)

That's absurd. Google's not going to see the filtered reviews unless they start doing a lot more JavaScript execution than they've been doing, and why would Yelp care if a browser extension or spammers see filtered reviews?

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

#155

Post by adavies42 »

gdilla wrote: post #68
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.

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,…

man, i still miss vindigo. is there really no market for a paid, curated, offline-cached local-information database?

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

#156

Post by adavies42 »

jabo wrote: post #147
alanfalcon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially complicated when you realize that their mapping system is completely broken for numerous addresses. I used Yelp to try to find a good local cafe to eat at in Irvine. Drove right to the spot indicated on the map and found an industrial complex. Had to look up the business name on Google Maps to find that it was about five miles South of where Yelp told me the cafe was. Same thing happened again in Vegas, lo…

I've had the same problem multiple times with business addresses being wrong on Yelp.

complementary i suppose to the google maps problem where half the restaurants are closed....

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

#157

Post by jonknee »

ceejayoz wrote: post #154
jonknee wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The captcha is there so people don't scrape the filtered reviews (be it Google, a browser extension, spammers, etc)

That's absurd. Google's not going to see the filtered reviews unless they start doing a lot more JavaScript execution than they've been doing, and why would Yelp care if a browser extension or spammers see filtered reviews?

Google's not going to see them because they have purposefully made them difficult to scrape...

I'd imagine Yelp would rather not have a "Yelp Unfiltered" extension made and their filtering becomes less important. Same for helping spammers automate their processes by checking up on their reviews.

It's a race to the bottom though, the spammers will eventually win.

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

#158

Post by AlexBlom »

twoodfin wrote: post #5
AlexBlom wrote: post #2

Wow. Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews. The hard part is staying one step ahead of less-legitimate accounts. There's always somebody trying to cheat the system, and stopping these users often results in a tradeoff.

> 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…

I agree it's easy to reproduce. Not an easy problem by any measure.

Putting in my credit card (or revealing any information I don't deem relevant to the company / form) is always an immediate deal breaker. For Yelp, a critical mass of reviews is needed, I'm not sure they can afford that.

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

#159

Post by Quizzy »

Let's talk about the mobile only world: would a native mobile app be self-verifying in that only a mobile phone could download and use the app - so every review requires a real smartphone to post the review. Although "reputation" companies could game this situation by buying 1000 smartphones, but then you would have 1000 smartphones with the same pattern of up-posting such that it would be easier for an algorithm to recognize these "planted" phones.

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

#160

Post by mcguire »

lazerwalker wrote: post #17

Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services. A company I used to freelance for found that after they stopped paying Yelp for a premium account, they started seeing more negative reviews and a number of their positive reviews were filtered out. They got almost daily phone calls from Yelp marketing types es…

"to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services."

Wait, Yelp gets money from the businesses they list? Yeah, that's not a conflict of interest.

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