31–40 of 48 posts
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…
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…
What this ultimately means is that when looking at a map or listing with sites and summarized data you can't trust the summarized results which may have been gamed/poisoned.
Also poisoning the summary is very powerful in controlling which users even notice the property (e.g. 25 reviews 3.2 stars - might be worth looking at, 15 reviews 2 star = probably avoid... the difference is 10 bogus 5 star reviews, not hard)
black-hat SEO works
And remember that people are far more inclined to write reviews when they have had a negative experience, and not a positive one.
A tough task. I wish you all the best.
Part of the point of the review model of Yelp (and Amazon, for that matter) is that you don't have to trust a review. You only have to trust the consensus of all of the reviewers - which, at best, is very, very hard to spoof. When I see a place on yelp with a 4-star average on 1000 reviews, I feel very confident about going there. It's hard to get to that critical mass, but far from impossible - and you don't need so…
Furthermore, if your property gets too many bad reviews you can either rebrand (expensive) or just create a new property description (this is what happened when my sister found a screw in her food - the restaurant retaliated to her Yelp negative review by just creating a cloned restaurant listing then spamming that listing with positive reviews).
Yelp was wonderful when it first started because the people on it all loved restaurants enough to actually want to sign up to some random site and review them. The community was small and I was easily able to pick out people I trusted and people I didn't.
As it grew, more of the general public started reviewing things and things started to go downhill. No longer can I remember who has similar taste as I do or who to trust. There are so many reviews that it has become rather useless. Every business seems to be 3-4 stars from Michelin two star restaurants to the taco cart on the corner.
Worse, ratings change over time. Restaurants I rated as 5 stars years ago no longer qualify as 5 stars today, so even when I see someone I know, I have to look at the date of their review and discount appropriately.
Compounding things, there are all sorts of reasons why people give negative ratings from food delivery being late (which has nothing to do with your experience going to a restaurant) to having bad service because the restaurant opened the day before to not feeling like you got enough subjective value out of it.
Now, if Yelp had a collaborative filtering engine ala Netflix or only showed reviews from people who shared similar taste as I do, it might regain some of its usefulness. Maybe if they did something ala Hacker News and required constant up votes to keep the rating from falling over time? Or an OKCupid-style personality matching matrix to tell if someone is just cheaper than I am or demands a higher level of service.
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 really wish there was a professional review company that charged restaurants for the reviews and then made the information public. Zagat's model of charging for the ratings isn't helpful because the reviews are limited to their ecosystem and don't show up in the places I read reviews (seamlessweb, google, etc) Yelp reviews are so astroturfed the ratings are useless.
This will happen without any conscious effort:
1. Restaurants will only pay for the review if they're fairly confident it'll be good.
2. When the reviewer comes, if the manager is able able to tell who it is, he'll make sure the reviewer gets perfect service.
3. Even if the reviewer's identity is secret, the restaurant will know that the review is happening this week, and can (temporarily) improve quality for that week only. The restaurant knows more or less when the review will be happening because they paid for it (earliest possible date) and they know when it'll be published (because they'll want to know before paying).
4. When the review company grows beyond a small local area, the company will have to hire more reviewers. Most likely reviewers will review establishments close to them, that is each reviewer will have a territory he/she covers. Some reviewers will be harsher than others, so restaurants in certain areas will be ranked higher than those in others. Areas will higher rankings will grow faster (because the folks paying like higher reviews).
5. If reviewers double as salesmen, the ones who review more harshly will make fewer sales, smaller commissions, and are thus less likely to stay with the company (either from quitting or from being fired).
6. When the company's clients (i.e., the restaurants) in city A notice they overall get lower marks than those in nearby city B, they'll complain and demand to be reviewed by the same person who reviewed city B.
In short, the incentives for this company would be towards high reviews, not accurate reviews.
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…
This still seems to be the only way to get a good recommendation out of the web. It puts us in touch, but we still have to pay attention and filter and aggregate manually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Which mug? Tossing a full cup of coffee across a room sounds fun.
Part of the point of the review model of Yelp (and Amazon, for that matter) is that you don't have to trust a review. You only have to trust the consensus of all of the reviewers - which, at best, is very, very hard to spoof. When I see a place on yelp with a 4-star average on 1000 reviews, I feel very confident about going there. It's hard to get to that critical mass, but far from impossible - and you don't need so…
In large numbers, yes, it's hard to spoof a good/bad rating. But the mode/median of review numbers is likely to be easily game-able (like 20 reviews, for example). Furthermore, if your property gets too many bad reviews you can either rebrand (expensive) or just create a new property description (this is what happened when my sister found a screw in her food - the restaurant retaliated to her Yelp negative review by…
However, yes, it's easier to game the numbers when the volume of reviews is low. That's an ongoing problem - for everyone.