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Still trust restaurant reviews?

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Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#21

Post by mitcheme »

parfe wrote: post #4

I don't bother with 5 star or 1 star reviews. Too much emotion to be sensibly reviewed. Three stars provide a nice balance. Things like "food was good, but service was slow." I find more valuable than a 2 paragraph review about how a waiter spilled a glass of water and only comped one entrée or a five paragraph review that can be summarized as "I love this place more than breathing."

I like to read 1-star reviews (for anything) just to get a rough idea for what a 'worst case scenario' might look like for that particular thing. If the 1-star reviews are all about entitled patrons, that's pretty encouraging, whereas a few reviews about rats or cockroaches would make me look elsewhere. To use another example, I was looking at books on Amazon yesterday, and the only one-star review for a particular jQuery book was from this guy who was mad because the book didn't explain how to put quotation marks inside another pair of quotation marks (it was NOT a Javascript book) or how to download Firebug. Whereas another book's 1-star reviews might be about how the examples don't work, core material was skipped over, etc. When I was looking for a travel mug I could throw in my purse, I nixed any option that had a 1-star review about leaks (including many which were advertised as leakproof), and ended up getting the best travel mug I've ever had. I can shake it upside down or toss it across the room and my coffee stays safely contained. I think the bad reviews of it were about how hard it was to clean and how the lid came apart too easily. (It's supposed to come apart, to make it easier to clean...)

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#22

Post by vnorby »

I'm solving the same problem at http://tattle.com.

Our pitch is "Local business reviews and recommendations from people you trust."

For me, as a vegetarian (http://tattle.com/#communities/vegetarian), the problem with Yelp has always been that I don't have any good way of finding vegetarian-friendly restaurants. They are good for factual queries, but trust is a delicate issue. That's mainly because when you run a search for "vegetarian" on Yelp, you're getting back a list of places that have the word in their name or description, or occasionally a review. But actually, places are not vegetarian, people are vegetarian. So if you want to know what place to go to, you need to know who goes there. That's how we're solving the trust gap (in addition to other problems with reviews).

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#23

Post by eli »

mitcheme wrote: post #21
parfe wrote: post #4

I don't bother with 5 star or 1 star reviews. Too much emotion to be sensibly reviewed. Three stars provide a nice balance. Things like "food was good, but service was slow." I find more valuable than a 2 paragraph review about how a waiter spilled a glass of water and only comped one entrée or a five paragraph review that can be summarized as "I love this place more than breathing."

I like to read 1-star reviews (for anything) just to get a rough idea for what a 'worst case scenario' might look like for that particular thing. If the 1-star reviews are all about entitled patrons, that's pretty encouraging, whereas a few reviews about rats or cockroaches would make me look elsewhere. To use another example, I was looking at books on Amazon yesterday, and the only one-star review for a particular j…

I do the same thing and I'm pretty sure I have the same mug.

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#24

Post by corin_ »

smackfu wrote: post #5
wccrawford wrote: post #2

Trust? Nobody has ever 'trusted' reviews by other people. They've used them to help make decisions, but 'trust'? I use reviews to find the negatives of something, and then decide if that negative bothers me. Filtering out people with an axe to grind can be an art all in itself, but many people are pretty easy to spot.

Yeah, there are two types of reviewers: 1) I review every place I go. 2) I want to punish/warn people about a bad experience. The first type is way more useful, since there is no way to tell whether one person's bad experience is typical or not.

Possibly much less common, but another type of reviewer which I fit into is "Doesn't bother to review unless a place has been consistently awesome over multiple visits, so much so that I feel they deserve my thanks".

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#25

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nostromo wrote: post #7

> To solve the anonymous review problem, its time to inject real identities into recommendations. People are usually more honest when speaking anonymously -- not the other way around. It may help with astroturfing and flaming temporarily, but competitors and trolls will always find a way around real identity online.

>People are usually more honest when speaking anonymously [...] It [real ID] may help with astroturfing [...]

In the EU astroturfing is unlawful/illegal (not sure which) under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD).

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#26

Post by dcosson »

jdminhbg wrote: post #3

I trust Yelp/Urbanspoon reviews the same way I trust Amazon reviews: By reading them and looking for clues that the reviewer is real and has astes and concerns similar to mine. I gloss over uncritical reviews, whether they're real or not; a review that says "everything was great but the fries" I'll put stock in. It's possible that astroturfers could start taking that into account, but it's hard to imagine. The kind o…

I would guess this is what a lot of people do and it's certainly what keeps me from giving up entirely on Yelp/Urbanspoon. But the downside is that ranking results by average review becomes useless; you have to dig pretty deep to find the place with an average of 1.5 stars that has a couple of thoughtful reviews indicating it's somewhere you might like. (i.e. you have to get your reviews in linear rather than constant time :)

Companies like Hunch are addressing the problem from the social-networking standpoint that the author suggests (their Local app adds a Facebook friend layer on top of scraped Yelp reviews), but it seems most people are not yet dissatisfied enough with Yelp to consider getting themselves invested in yet another social networking service.

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#27

Post by erehweb »

wccrawford wrote: post #2

Trust? Nobody has ever 'trusted' reviews by other people. They've used them to help make decisions, but 'trust'? I use reviews to find the negatives of something, and then decide if that negative bothers me. Filtering out people with an axe to grind can be an art all in itself, but many people are pretty easy to spot.

Sure they have. 24 secs into the opening of the Siskel and Ebert TV show, have truck with logo saying "Trust Roger Ebert"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDdNVHoalJ0 (O.K., was made up for the show, but illustrates the general principle).

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#28

Post by ChuckMcM »

I agree with most that reviews are generally prone to abuse. (Although frankly some of the Amazon non-serious reviews are just priceless, like the Cat in the Hat ones [1])

I am also surprised Facebook hasn't jumped in here, seems a really useful product would be 'facebook reviews' which linked reviews to profiles. Then 'the set of reviews you trust' could fall right out of your friends list.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Hat-Dr-Seuss/product-reviews/03948...

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#30

Post by ramchip »

jerf wrote: post #16
akitchell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point - what if your reviews are shared between your friends? Our findings are that people can be honest in a community where they know their recommendations will mostly help their friends find great places.

Take the number of your friends. Subtract the "lurker" ratio, which most studies show to be pretty high. Now subtract the ones who have never been to the place you want to see the review of. Now subtract the ones who went there but didn't review it (because do you leave reviews of every single business you use? if so, where do you find the time to do anything else?). The mode of the result will be 0. If your friends…

That, and often I need recommendations when I'm not in my usual place, like when traveling. The odds that my friends would 1) use the service and 2) review a place I'm interested in are very low.

If I want a recommendation from my coffee aficionado friend... I'll just ask him.

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