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Still trust restaurant reviews?

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Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#41

Post by akitchell »

Cherian_Abraham wrote: post #33

As someone who had dabbled in this "social recommendations" space, finding reviews from friends when you do not have a big enough social graph is probably the biggest difficulty. Also, it may work in a place like SF, but outside of those deeply networked places, it becomes difficult to find restaurants with reviews on Yelp, forget finding places where your friends have been to. And remember that people are far more i…

Thanks Cherian

Would love to talk further about your experiences.

Feel free to write me - ak@urbantag.com

Thanks! and yep - def a tough problem... ;)

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#42

Post by kenjackson »

Why doesn't collaborative filtering work for popular review sites? The Netflix recommender is pretty solid. Obviously you aren't likely to have reviewed 200 restaurants in Yelp, but it still seems like it would be effective if you had 10-30.

But if I could go to Yelp and have it recommend restaurants based on my past ratings (well I have none now), that would be nice. I'd even take it a step further. I want recommendations of actual dishes.

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#43

Post by ajhoag »

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.

I acknowledge your point about people having the courage to be more honest when speaking anonymously, however I suspect that mostly applies to public fora. If you consider limiting scope to only people you know or trust, I find comments can be much more valuable and transparent. Furthermore, humans are really good at applying personality filters to people they are familiar with... (disclosure: I work at urbantag)

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#44

Post by thegorgon »

why is this the biggest thing we're trying to solve? can't we use these incredibly powerful algorithms to solve a real problem? there are so many restaurant recommenders out or coming soon."You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?"

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#45

Post by lsc »

IgorPartola wrote: post #17
sedev wrote: post #8

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…

Dealing with ungraceful customers is #1 thing I look for in a business. I am not usually ungraceful. I always try to be polite and friendly with any customer service rep, etc. However, I think it says a lot about a company. For example, a budget hosting provider that I used for a while would go off on any customer who posted a negative review of them in the comments section of a blog I frequent (LowEndBox). They turn…

I know this is how most people feel, and I do try to pretend to be a sane, rational person who doesn't get angry when dealing with customers, and I think that helps me a lot. Flying off the handle at a customer almost never makes business sense.

But I don't think it's such a good overall heuristic for picking service providers. Personally, I'd rather deal with an employee who was good technically and bad socially than deal with someone who is the other way around. (I mean, if I could get both at a price I could afford, that'd be perfect. but that's not usually how my world works.)

If the food is good and the service is fast, sure, it'd be nice if the waiter was also friendly, but if I had to sacrifice something; price, speed of service, quality of food, or politeness of service, I'm going to pick the rude fast waiter and the good cook every time.

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#46

Post by ajhoag »

gmichnikov wrote: post #13

I also find Yelp pretty useless at this point, so I've been hoping to find a site that allows me to easily see the places that my friends (or friends of friends) have been and to see their reviews of those places. Are all reviews on your site going to be public, or is there going to be an option to only show them to your friends and their friends? I'm hoping it's the latter.

Thanks for your feedback. I think you'll like what we are up to! (I work at urbantag) If you have an iPhone, contact us and we'll prioritize you in the beta (reference this HN comment).

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#47

Post by vnorby »

autarch wrote: post #31
vnorby wrote: post #22

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…

Have you looked at http://vegguide.org ?

Just did, there's also happycow. None of these sites have very much content, they clearly are very old, and tattle is not tailored specifically for vegetarians and vegans - we're just good for those types of communities.

Re: Still trust restaurant reviews?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

vnorby wrote: post #47
autarch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at http://vegguide.org ?

Just did, there's also happycow. None of these sites have very much content, they clearly are very old, and tattle is not tailored specifically for vegetarians and vegans - we're just good for those types of communities.

[deleted]
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