In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator).
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
A few people seemed to have missed an important step in the argument:
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
"The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark."
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
I find it fascinating when someone finds a historical parallel to a situation that we think is novel and unprecedented, reminding us that nothing is truly new, and it's not as bad as we think.
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
I would say there's no moral difference between a human operator and a mechanical operator whose behavior is controlled by a human. Configuring the operator to drop calls from a particular area code would be an example in the case you provided.
"Mechanical honesty" worked because it was much harder to have automated "if statement" mechanisms with non-electronic machinery. And then electronic computers made it much, much easier.
Can you elaborate more on (or give an example of) "mechanical honesty"? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem unfeasible to implement biases in mechanical systems (especially government departments!), but I haven't given it a lot of thought.
> exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty"
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though:
Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system.
In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables).
In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.
SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out.
For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank.
In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures.
Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right.
If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.
> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.
Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website.
If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.
It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives
They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.
What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
You're assuming that Google's algorithm treats a small restaurant website and a site like Seamless equally based on the same SEO ranking factors. That assumption ignores some important factors;
- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.
- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.
- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.
- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.
perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it
The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.
I've seen something like this play out twice already. The first round was quite some years back with Facebook pages beating the restaurants' own websites. Facebook's SEO was so much better than the average website that many businesses, including restaurants, eventually gave up and just put everything on Facebook.
The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link.
In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).
Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
I believe it's the wider SV business model of 'platformization' that eventually gives rise to these types of mafia tactics as you say.
It was never going to be enough for Yelp's investors for them to simply replace the physical Yellow Pages. To monetize (sell ads), they had to be the start and end point for every customer in their search for a local business. That's why they started harassing you to download the app or set up an account if you opened a page on your phone; to build a base of users who'd open the app first, and not a search engine or something to look up a location.
Now that the restaurant and personal services industry is dependent on having a positive Yelp presence, Yelp appears to be pressing their advantage further by becoming a middleman, taking a cut of every deal made on 'their' platform.
"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it's really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
When I order from a local restaurant, I want THEM to get my money, not somebody in sili valley.
Yelp skims using this man-in-the-middle attack on the restaurant's telephones. (Payment card companies skim too, but there's a lot of competition in that field so it's under control.)
Yelp might argue that I, the purchaser, am not hurt by their shenanigans, so I shouldn't worry about it. But, on the contrary, I am hurt when my local restaurants have their margins shaved. Several have had to close their doors in my neighborhood. How am I hurt? For one thing I like the restaurants that closed. For another, I have neighbors and friends among restaurant owners and workers. For a third, some of my tax and charity money goes to helping unemployed people.
AT THE VERY LEAST Yelp's recorded announcement ("awesomeness???") should inform me that I'm going through a third party.
My local telco just delivered a printed Yellow Pages book for the first time in many years. I'm going to use it. I'm going to keep the takeout menus I get.
I wonder if this can be called "wire fraud" in some new telecom regulations?
When 2 extortionists (Yelp and Grubhub) meet, what you get is extortion 2.0.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
When the post dot-com wave of consumer companies arrived, they found a market that was more likely to trust them - the scrappy underdog - than the big, evil corporation. They were a breath of fresh air. A needed change in a stale ecosystem.
Jon Favreau said he based Iron Man off of Elon Musk. Tech was cool. And more importantly trusted.
And then Yelp & co arrived. Uber at least had the decency to start out by screwing over the competition. They did their best to avoid screwing over the customers. But Yelp? Yelp doesn't give a fuck.
They're ratfuckers to the core, and they'll torch everyone and everything if it helps them get a quarterly bonus.
This article really buries the lede, that all of these restaurants agreed to pay GrubHub for any leads that GrubHub generated. Sounds like the restaurants should simply stop buying GrubHub’s marketing service, if it isn’t worthwhile for them.
Keep it simple: I kept a basket of takeout menus from my favorite neighborhood restaurants in the kitchen. Call the number on the takeout menu.
In the event you call and your menu is out of date, it's a minor inconvenience and you'll grab a new one when you go get your food. I never had a restaurant give me trouble because I had an old menu, usually they were happy I'd been a customer so long I had an old menu.
New restaurant? Yeah, you might end up calling from some shady Yelp number but then you add the takeout menu to your collection and use that number next time.
We don't need the internet to order from restaurants. Plus there's something nice about the time your favorite restaurant starts to recognize your number.
Does anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about:
- Open Now (Optional)
- Sort by Rating
- Search by food category, not name of restaurant.
Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.
I see a lot of people saying this must be illegal, and the reason Yelp hasn't been sued is because restaurant owners can't afford legal fees.
Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.
I am not a big fan of regulations unless it is to provide more transparency so people can make informed decisions. There should be regulations that require when listing a number for a business that there is a large disclaimer when the number isn’t actually owned by the business. I am sure that will kill this practice.
Yelp is one those companies. I use the product regularly, but I hate doing so -- the experience is awful and the core information is rarely particularly helpful. But they still get me to come in because they have the most information about some places.
What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.
Google results for businesses and even government institutions here in NL are rife with numbers that have been replaced by expensive 1-900 numbers that connect you through to the business whose number you intended to reach. Very lucrative and highly unethical, and Google being part and parcel of this makes them look particularly bad. If anything Google should know what the right phone number for a business is, and if they can't even get that right you have to wonder about the quality of their results in general.
Of course the page of the business or entity you look for should be the top result for its own search query.
I fail to understand how exactly yelp/grubhub would bill the 10-20% of the order amount of the phone call. The call is recorded, yes (a reason why they can forget about that in the EU, in the EU you would need to implement a system for the caller to deny consent of the recording while on the line other than "if you don't like being recorded hang up now"). But do they manually listen to every phone call, make sure the restaurant place tells the correct amount, calculate their fee and put this on a bill to the restaurant?
[+] [-] ajb|5 years ago|reply
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
[edited for punctuation]
[+] [-] kens|5 years ago|reply
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
[+] [-] hedora|5 years ago|reply
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
[+] [-] rconti|5 years ago|reply
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
[+] [-] castratikron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selfhoster11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sxzxs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps there is a business model for bespoke extended validation ssl certs where, for example, they are tied to a physical address.
[+] [-] durnygbur|5 years ago|reply
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
As part of the public I more expect almost everything internet to be biased by commercial interests. Best you can do is seek out the less corrupted.
[+] [-] eru|5 years ago|reply
A paper trail keeps people honest to some degree, too.
[+] [-] redis_mlc|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bichiliad|5 years ago|reply
Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system.
In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables).
In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
[+] [-] underwater|5 years ago|reply
SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out.
For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank.
In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures.
Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right.
If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.
[+] [-] covercash|5 years ago|reply
This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.
Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|5 years ago|reply
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...
[+] [-] briandear|5 years ago|reply
If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.
It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.
A better experience for everyone.
[+] [-] Kalium|5 years ago|reply
They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.
What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.
- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.
- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.
- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
[+] [-] addicted|5 years ago|reply
When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it
The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
[+] [-] franga2000|5 years ago|reply
The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link.
In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).
[+] [-] jimmaswell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbal|5 years ago|reply
Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
[+] [-] tb303|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjs3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|5 years ago|reply
It was never going to be enough for Yelp's investors for them to simply replace the physical Yellow Pages. To monetize (sell ads), they had to be the start and end point for every customer in their search for a local business. That's why they started harassing you to download the app or set up an account if you opened a page on your phone; to build a base of users who'd open the app first, and not a search engine or something to look up a location.
Now that the restaurant and personal services industry is dependent on having a positive Yelp presence, Yelp appears to be pressing their advantage further by becoming a middleman, taking a cut of every deal made on 'their' platform.
[+] [-] aledalgrande|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
- Yelp's founder on why Google is a problem.
[+] [-] colpabar|5 years ago|reply
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
[+] [-] jamestimmins|5 years ago|reply
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
[+] [-] OliverJones|5 years ago|reply
Yelp skims using this man-in-the-middle attack on the restaurant's telephones. (Payment card companies skim too, but there's a lot of competition in that field so it's under control.)
Yelp might argue that I, the purchaser, am not hurt by their shenanigans, so I shouldn't worry about it. But, on the contrary, I am hurt when my local restaurants have their margins shaved. Several have had to close their doors in my neighborhood. How am I hurt? For one thing I like the restaurants that closed. For another, I have neighbors and friends among restaurant owners and workers. For a third, some of my tax and charity money goes to helping unemployed people.
AT THE VERY LEAST Yelp's recorded announcement ("awesomeness???") should inform me that I'm going through a third party.
My local telco just delivered a printed Yellow Pages book for the first time in many years. I'm going to use it. I'm going to keep the takeout menus I get.
I wonder if this can be called "wire fraud" in some new telecom regulations?
[+] [-] diego_moita|5 years ago|reply
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” ― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
[+] [-] areoform|5 years ago|reply
Yelp is ratfucking the entire tech industry.
When the post dot-com wave of consumer companies arrived, they found a market that was more likely to trust them - the scrappy underdog - than the big, evil corporation. They were a breath of fresh air. A needed change in a stale ecosystem.
Jon Favreau said he based Iron Man off of Elon Musk. Tech was cool. And more importantly trusted.
And then Yelp & co arrived. Uber at least had the decency to start out by screwing over the competition. They did their best to avoid screwing over the customers. But Yelp? Yelp doesn't give a fuck.
They're ratfuckers to the core, and they'll torch everyone and everything if it helps them get a quarterly bonus.
Or, so I've heard.
[+] [-] lacker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkrisc|5 years ago|reply
In the event you call and your menu is out of date, it's a minor inconvenience and you'll grab a new one when you go get your food. I never had a restaurant give me trouble because I had an old menu, usually they were happy I'd been a customer so long I had an old menu.
New restaurant? Yeah, you might end up calling from some shady Yelp number but then you add the takeout menu to your collection and use that number next time.
We don't need the internet to order from restaurants. Plus there's something nice about the time your favorite restaurant starts to recognize your number.
[+] [-] proverbialbunny|5 years ago|reply
- Open Now (Optional)
- Sort by Rating
- Search by food category, not name of restaurant.
Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.
[+] [-] chrisbolt|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232
[+] [-] bigbubba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fairity|5 years ago|reply
Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.
[+] [-] adrr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniellarusso|5 years ago|reply
‘Publishing’ knowingly ‘wrong’ phone numbers associated with a business, would that cause damages?
[+] [-] elefanten|5 years ago|reply
What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.
[+] [-] baggachipz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
Of course the page of the business or entity you look for should be the top result for its own search query.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|5 years ago|reply