The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes.
This has several important implications.
- It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume; and
- Again I'll say something I've said here repeatedly: the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything.
Secondly, businesses like Yelp risk going down the comScore route. 10 years ago comScore was the source for visitor numbers, which drove advertising revenue. If you paid you got accurate numbers. If you didn't, comScore "guessed", and for some reason those numbers always seemed low, so much so that lots complained.
The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted.
It's why I think companies like Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) should stay out the content business. We're great at connecting people to things they want. If we're one of those things they want then we have at least the potential for the appearance (if not the actuality) of impropriety, at the very least.
I just don't see local reviews and social search going, well, anywhere, certainly anytime soon.
"It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume"
I've been a member of Angie's List for over 2 years now. It's not only saved me countless amounts of money over choosing nationally-advertised service companies for stuff like plumbing and HVAC work, but it's saved me tons of aggravation filtering out the honest, hard-working businesses from the fly-by-night charlatans who pile on services and "annual maintenance contracts" that are just code for finding yet another problem next year.
How do they get "local" reviews? Simple. If you pay for it, you'll review to keep the cycle of reviews going. If you're invested $30-60/yr. to subscribe, you feel like you have a vested interest in keeping both the review site and the service provider alive. I liken it to the SomethingAwful forums: the ones who subscribe are also the most frequent posters.
But, Angie's List also uses their own tactics to keep reviews flowing and fresh. They will email reminders to review service providers you've recently browsed if you decided to use them. They'll even call you to record a review over the phone and then they'll transcribe it.
It's why they've been blowing everyone else out of the water in "local" search since the 90s.
What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and +1 buttons. There's isn't a -1 or notlike option.
"the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything."
I completely agree. The other huge problem with social search is I don't have 100% overlap with all of my friends. If I like Alice's taste in music, and Bob's taste in food, searching among Alice's taste in food and Bob's taste in music is a complete loss for me. Instead, I want "Netflix search": "people similar to you that rated Foo 4 stars also rated Bar 4 stars.
I think social search has value if we define it differently. In other words, I agree with your assessment. The thing that is social, is search, and has value is something more implicit. It observes the behaviors and decisions of other people, perhaps your friends but perhaps not, and infers recommendations from those. Amazon and netflix already do this in their domains to great success. It will become more prevalent. This is not what most people think of when they say "social search," and this is not the thing that you are (rightly) deriding. But I would imagine that in a decade, this is what will eventually be described with the term "social search."
"The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes"
Is there any data to support this point. Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.
"The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted."
That's a key part of it. They do two things: keep track of a "fair score," and sell to some of the businesses being scored. It's an inherent conflict of interest. And they have not taken any steps to mitigate it.
Google faces the same problem, but the AdWords auction mechanism diffuses the COI so the temptation to extortion is mitigated.
As some have pointed out farther down, newspapers and magazines have the same problem. Serious newspapers have a wall between editorial and advertising to mitigate the COI.
I question the value of social search in general. It doesn't matter what your friends like. What matters is what others with similar tastes like. The only good thing about social search is the context informed by the relationships.
I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months.
It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate.
The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account.
Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate.
The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added.
Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone.
It's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it.
I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads.
Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is flaky at best, and a scam at worst. "freedom of speech" has not the same meaning when you are at Yelp.
Earlier this summer, a Yelp salesman called Brader's house to ask if he wanted to advertise on the Yelp site.
Yelp will never make it as a public company, which means that it should technically fizzle and die sooner rather than later. What they do isn't illegal, but it should be; its revenue model is unethical, sleazy, blackmailing, extortion.
Those are some pretty bold accusations based on rather thin evidence. Are you suggesting that such a service is incapable of running above-board? Is there anything Yelp could do to prove to you that it is operating in an ethical and reasonable manner?
Yelp's filtering algorithm is terrible. Purely anecdotal, but: I've tried writing reviews on Yelp several times. When I first started reviewing and my reviews were getting filtered out, I'd think "OK, maybe I just need to continue reviewing and eventually Yelp will realize I'm not a faker". After about 20 reviews (spread over a couple weeks, most of which still remain flagged), I got pissed and gave up.
How does Amazon solve this problem? AFAICT, Amazon doesn't filter out any reviews, and I've never noticed fake reviews being a problem. Are people simply less inclined to give fake-glowing or fake-terrible reviews on Amazon? (Makes somewhat sense to me, since Amazon is less "personal".)
Amazon (and app stores, for that matter) have a huge advantage in that they can verify that the reviewer is at least a customer. Amazon differentiates these reviewers visually in the reviews. Yelp cannot take this verification step.
The problem Yelp has is that they don't allow unfiltered reviews to be contested. So even if Brader or his customers wanted to contact Yelp and say "Hey, our reviews aren't spam or for gaming the system" and explain what happened, there's no easy/official way to do it.
The one and only time I wrote a review on Yelp, I gave a restaurant a one star rating because the customer service was truly terrible and I left with a horrible taste in my mouth (figuratively). The review wasn't riddled with spelling/grammatical errors and it extremely close to the word limit Yelp has in place. Anyone reading it could tell it wasn't a fake review. Heck, in the few days the review was up, it got voted up to most useful review. But I got hit by the filter anyways. I suspect the algorithm really is flawed and not being manipulated like some people claim, but maybe I'm an optimist.
From personal experience Yelp is a company I do not respect or trust in anything.
Yelp absolutely don't care about small business and how their filtering system works. My wife is running a small business and she has been facing exactly the problems described in the article. Real customers posting real reviews but quickly disappearing in the filtered reviews for unknown reasons, some of her customers have been on Yelp for a while but still their reviews are filtered, while some competitors (we guess) post a negative review with what is most likely a fake account stayed, and are never filtered out.
Like in the article, my wife was contacted by Yelp to advertise, and she declined... Soon after some of the positive reviews vanished!
Yelp until a year or so ago didn't even let business owner reply to a negative review, so the power was in the hand of the reviewer. What is worst is that even with that in place, even if a fake review is posted and advertising for a competitive business which is against their TOS, Yelp simply do not care of removing such review.
Another area wher Yelp is doing a really poor job: it is still possible to review a closed business or a business that change name BUT the business owner can't reply to any such post. So the communication is borked and Yelp does't care to fix that. They do mention "freedom of speech" which my wife and I do get, but then how come someone can post a review on a close business, but the previous business owner can't reply to it?? If people are able to review but owner can't reply, it means that their back end system has some logic to handle that, but the code for the owner to reply has most likely been disabled ! Why? That's not really how freedom of speech work!
Yelp is NOT at all for promoting small business, they are in the business of selling ads and having the most page views. Trying to be a fair and honest business is not at all on their business plan.
From what I heard from other small business owner here in the Bay Area, they have experienced mostly the same.
Yelp is what I consider a SCAM and as a software engineer I will never consider a job in this unprofessional company. Sooner or later I think the truth will be shown on how Yelp manipulate their system for their own benefits.
Finally to conclude this rant, my wife business is still going on even with some negative reviews because we made sure that she was not dependent on Yelp for getting customers. She had many happy returning customers for the past 3 years, even if their positive reviews disappeared.
Yelp are in a hard place, they show negative reviews about peoples businesses. People who work there, or own the business absolutely hate this, because it could cost them there business. Nobody likes having their work threatened.
And most people who own businesses think they are doing a good job, and don't like criticism. They take it very personally, and blame Yelp rather than the reviewer.
The article could have revealed that of the 18 "hidden" reviews, 14 were the only review by the Yelper and 11 were in a one week period. These are two of the main criteria for Yelp's filtering.
I'm surprised people believe that Yelp would be so clumsy and unethical to simply penalize non-advertisers.
There is certainly a ton of press around this coming from several reputable media outlets for months. Google for 'yelp extortion'. So you shouldn't be surprised. This is a real problem for them. At minimum, here is a documented case of legitimate reviews that simply aren't shown. They are basically saying 'The computer did that, so fuck off' and end up coming off like a bully, which by all measured terms they are.
I'm surprised people think they wouldn't. They have the perfect hideout. Whatever the case they can always blame it on the "algorithm," and short of auditing their source code, nobody can really prove them otherwise.
A competitor of the dog training business hires an SEO Search Engine Optimiser to increase his business.
To do that they post negative reviews of all the competitors.
They post fake positive reviews of their client.
I have tracked this down before. The positive reviews all looked suspiciously similar and over-glowing.
I have seen the same review, the same day, by the same guy, in multiple nearby neighborhoods.
This also can happen when an SEO marketer calls and you turn him down. He then spites your site and calls back again later to see if your more agreeable....
The 4 new reviews appear to have been generated by the article and I suspect 2 or 3 of them will eventually be hidden. And rightfully so since they are content-free and by new reviewers.
The obvious thing to do for the guy is to post a note explaining the situation on his website and link to Chicago Tribune's article. That should alleviate most if not all concerns of those who read that Yelp review.
(edit) And display the note only to those coming from Yelp.
Anyone find it weird that Yelp makes you pass a reCaptcha when trying to look at filtered reviews? Clearly you can look at unfiltered reviews without this. It's almost like Yelp is yelling "Don't look at these reviews....please!"
Customer reviews and ratings can be one hell of a mess, not just for businesses but also for customers.
As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, which leave you more confused than when you started.
I generally read reviews to answer simple questions which the product listing does not answer. I try to find out if there are any common problems with a product.
A good FAQ and a list of the most common problems may be a better solution than pages of reviews.
Given Yelp's size, why doesn't it employ some collaborative filtering options? In general I don't care about everyone's reviews (especially of restaurants). But it would be interesting to know -- for people who like White Castle, McDonald's, and Denny's, but not Applebees -- what would they recommend. This is not the type of thing you could typically get by reading reviews by themselves (and maybe those people wouldn't do Yelp reviews in any case). But standalone reviews of things where taste is such a large component I find almost worthless. With that said dog training is probably something where taste plays a much smaller role.
There's a new mobile app called Ness (http://www.likeness.com) that's trying to do this. I happen to agree with you, so I really hope Ness can pull this off. I'd really like a recommendation service that knows my personal preferences.
They should really reply to the negative review and point to the other positive reviews. Whether genuine or fake, you will always have unhappy customers, but you have to deal graciously even with the nastiest of them.
It's easy to come down against Yelp, but small businesses have been trying to "game" Yelp in unsophisticated ways for some time.
We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be submitted by friends. They get angry at Yelp for allowing bad reviews to show up and think they can fix it with reviews written in all-caps with text like "Bob and Jane ARE THE NICEST, WARMEST, MOST AMAZING PEOPLE I KNOW and the person who wrote the review above DOESN"T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT." We always advise them not to use these tactics but to instead put a sign up asking their customers to leave reviews on Yelp (since all reviews on the site trend to 4.3, they're probably improving their position with every new review).
To recap:
- So a business has a small amount of reviews online, one negative from someone who has left more than 400 reviews.
- The business asks their loyal customers to leave positive reviews all at the same time.
- Yelp sees abnormal traffic and abnormal acceleration of overly-positive reviews from brand new users (OMG. Best Dog Trainer EVER!! A+++++ Would recommend).
- Yelp's algorithm flags this activity as abnormal since it looks similar to spam/paid/fake reviews and won't alter their algorithm to accommodate an attempt to game their system.
The reality is small businesses do this kind of "gaming" all the time and sometimes it's benign, sometimes it's malicious or fake. I once worked with a client who had left dozens of reviews about themselves and complained that Yelp always took them down which "wasn't fair". Yelp sees way more attempts at gaming reviews than you'd realize and I imagine they've gotten pretty good at it. Like Google's algorithms, Yelp's algorithms may occasionally flag real reviews. Both have an incentive to improve.
The other thing is that if I'm a sales agent at Yelp (responsible for bringing in $8k in revenue this month), I'm going to call on customers who have bad reviews (and thus show up lower in searches) first. This is not because I'm trying to scam anyone. It's because the folks at the bottom are usually the most eager to pay to show up at the top. The guys who already sit in the top 5 spots of an organic search have trouble justifying the expense. If I call on someone who is on the first page of a Yelp search, their first thought isn't going to be "this guy's trying to scam us". Likewise, the companies that buy Google ads aren't the ones who show up first in an organic search either (unless they demonstrate that the ROI justifies it. SMBs aren't typically as sophisticated).
This isn't extortion, it's not a scam, and it's not wrong. It may appear obtuse from the outside, but nothing would harm Yelp more than for these allegations to be true. It would be downright irresponsible of Yelp to try to do things this way from a shareholders' perspective.
TL;DR: SMBs try to game Yelp all the time. Yelp's built algorithms to look for this kind of behavior. This business hit a lot of triggers.
TL;DR: You're wrong. And you sound like someone from Yelp trying to "game the system" and write positive reviews about yourself. Maybe PG's algorithms should censor you without any evidence?
--------------
My parents had the exact same experience as in the article.
- A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from customers who were upset we had to send them letters after they didn't pay their bills.
- We encouraged people to review the business on Yelp. Despite numerous people (including a couple Yelp Elites) writing positive real reviews, interestingly, none of the reviews showed up on Yelp.
- Customers told us their reviews had not shown up, and when we called Yelp to find out why, a few reps either claimed there was no way to put the reviews back or they denied their existence. The one thing they did have in common was they promised things would be "fixed" if we advertised with them. I'm pretty sure that's closer to extortion than smart business.
- Last week, my dad finally caved and placed some ads on Yelp.
- Within an hour, there were suddenly dozens of additional reviews on there for the business, and the rating had shot up from 2 stars to 4.5 stars.
So let me ask you, if Yelp really thought those hidden reviews were trying to game the system, why were those reviews placed back when we agreed to spend some ad money? Yelp can't argue that their reviews are unbiased when stuff like this happens.
Agreed. If there was one terrible review written a year or two ago by someone with a reviewing history, and then suddenly twenty gushing all caps reviews filled with superlatives and exclamations of personal affection by reviewers with no other review history, all posted within the same week, I'd be upset if yelp didn't filter them out.
If some business tells all of their best customers to post a review on Yelp, a site they had never used before, then they actually are straw reviews and worth nothing - and this business owner admits that. Case closed. Filter working perfectly.
This is not to say that the one bad review characterizes this man's business in any way. He probably just doesn't have a tech-savvy, hip clientele, and the first yelper he ran into may have been a spoiled curmudgeon. What offsets the damage is that since he isn't drawing from that hip clientele, the review is likely not driving away any significant business.
The best response would probably be to put a Yelp sign in some prominent space, which might trigger someone who is familiar with their business to add a few more reviews. If he gives good service, the preponderance will be good. Much better idea than calling for a favor from your affectionate regulars.
The question is: Why doesn't Yelp have a flag for someone whom is posting a significant number of negative replies and one positive reply for the same business category?
Would make me question whether or not the owner of the business receiving a positive reply is trying to game Yelp's system.
I don't really like to admit it, but anyone who thinks it's just the "poor old algorithm" doing what it thinks is fair is misinformed.
Part of my core day job work involves identifying real vs not real people and also uses the same technology to drive everything - lucene. An algorithm that refuses to attempt identification beyond what data yelp itself stores is clearly in denial of the "mountain" of data available on people in the form of public web apis on the internet. I could write an "algorithm"/analyzer that does a better job than what yelp is currently doing in a day.
At the end of the day the biggest loser in all of this is probably yelp's users. Inaccurate reviews means you're getting inaccurate results on finding places local to you...which means the tool isn't nearly as useful to you as an end consumer. They might want to just sit down and find another way to get the same sales figures without sacrificing the quality of their product. Otherwise all it will take is someone else to come along and give people the right product to put them out of business. These stories that keep appearing on the internet about Yelp are increasingly becoming harder to ignore for everyone, which is sad for all the hard working engineers at Yelp who's only desire is to deliver a kick ass product. Lame
Hi spaznode, I will be really curious to hear more about your approach for doing a better filtering. Feel free to contact me (contact info/web site on my profile).
So technically if something like that is part of the algorithm ...
if (customer.RefusedToAdvertise) { foreach review in Reviews ( if(review.Score > 1) { reivew.visible = false; } ) }
Yelp can then say that "employees can do nothing, everything is done by the computer" and that would technically be true. And nothing can be done because they can not be forced to reveal the actual algorithm and any case will be thrown out of court?
I use a great car rental service at LAX. I've tried to put a glowing review on their Yelp page to help them get business to no available. It doesn't even show up. I'm guessing this is because they choose not to advertise with yelp either?
I just wrote another review right now to test this out again, and my account shows I have written two with them. Why is Yelp not displaying these on their business page, and their star rating is unchanged?
I would hope that Yelp doesn't actually operate in the manner in which its detractors accuse it of (as it would seem to be pretty cut-and-dry extortion).
I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site.
Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews might as well be random. If the reviews for places that I already like are this different from my own experiences, how useful can they be for places I'm thinking about going to?
It would be like if I read movie reviews from a reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse, is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their reviews useful.
It would be like if I read movie reviews from a
reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse,
is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their
reviews useful.
You could read the reviews, and then only go to movies that reviewer hates. Not a guarantee, but it does decrease the sample size. Unless the reviewer hates all movies.
[+] [-] cletus|14 years ago|reply
The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes.
This has several important implications.
- It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume; and
- Again I'll say something I've said here repeatedly: the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything.
Secondly, businesses like Yelp risk going down the comScore route. 10 years ago comScore was the source for visitor numbers, which drove advertising revenue. If you paid you got accurate numbers. If you didn't, comScore "guessed", and for some reason those numbers always seemed low, so much so that lots complained.
The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted.
It's why I think companies like Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) should stay out the content business. We're great at connecting people to things they want. If we're one of those things they want then we have at least the potential for the appearance (if not the actuality) of impropriety, at the very least.
I just don't see local reviews and social search going, well, anywhere, certainly anytime soon.
[+] [-] muhfuhkuh|14 years ago|reply
I've been a member of Angie's List for over 2 years now. It's not only saved me countless amounts of money over choosing nationally-advertised service companies for stuff like plumbing and HVAC work, but it's saved me tons of aggravation filtering out the honest, hard-working businesses from the fly-by-night charlatans who pile on services and "annual maintenance contracts" that are just code for finding yet another problem next year.
How do they get "local" reviews? Simple. If you pay for it, you'll review to keep the cycle of reviews going. If you're invested $30-60/yr. to subscribe, you feel like you have a vested interest in keeping both the review site and the service provider alive. I liken it to the SomethingAwful forums: the ones who subscribe are also the most frequent posters.
But, Angie's List also uses their own tactics to keep reviews flowing and fresh. They will email reminders to review service providers you've recently browsed if you decided to use them. They'll even call you to record a review over the phone and then they'll transcribe it.
It's why they've been blowing everyone else out of the water in "local" search since the 90s.
[+] [-] pbz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arohner|14 years ago|reply
I completely agree. The other huge problem with social search is I don't have 100% overlap with all of my friends. If I like Alice's taste in music, and Bob's taste in food, searching among Alice's taste in food and Bob's taste in music is a complete loss for me. Instead, I want "Netflix search": "people similar to you that rated Foo 4 stars also rated Bar 4 stars.
[+] [-] carbocation|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bala_tangylabs|14 years ago|reply
Is there any data to support this point. Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.
[+] [-] mturmon|14 years ago|reply
That's a key part of it. They do two things: keep track of a "fair score," and sell to some of the businesses being scored. It's an inherent conflict of interest. And they have not taken any steps to mitigate it.
Google faces the same problem, but the AdWords auction mechanism diffuses the COI so the temptation to extortion is mitigated.
As some have pointed out farther down, newspapers and magazines have the same problem. Serious newspapers have a wall between editorial and advertising to mitigate the COI.
[+] [-] pixcavator|14 years ago|reply
Isn't AdSense content business?
[+] [-] jclemenson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkbleikamp|14 years ago|reply
It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate.
The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account.
Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate.
The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added.
Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone.
[+] [-] yoda_sl|14 years ago|reply
Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is flaky at best, and a scam at worst. "freedom of speech" has not the same meaning when you are at Yelp.
[+] [-] rorrr|14 years ago|reply
http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...
[+] [-] shawnee_|14 years ago|reply
Yelp will never make it as a public company, which means that it should technically fizzle and die sooner rather than later. What they do isn't illegal, but it should be; its revenue model is unethical, sleazy, blackmailing, extortion.
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagefruit|14 years ago|reply
How does Amazon solve this problem? AFAICT, Amazon doesn't filter out any reviews, and I've never noticed fake reviews being a problem. Are people simply less inclined to give fake-glowing or fake-terrible reviews on Amazon? (Makes somewhat sense to me, since Amazon is less "personal".)
[+] [-] ShannonO|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gareim|14 years ago|reply
The one and only time I wrote a review on Yelp, I gave a restaurant a one star rating because the customer service was truly terrible and I left with a horrible taste in my mouth (figuratively). The review wasn't riddled with spelling/grammatical errors and it extremely close to the word limit Yelp has in place. Anyone reading it could tell it wasn't a fake review. Heck, in the few days the review was up, it got voted up to most useful review. But I got hit by the filter anyways. I suspect the algorithm really is flawed and not being manipulated like some people claim, but maybe I'm an optimist.
[+] [-] cschep|14 years ago|reply
Mix in a bit of "lazy" and you've got yourself a situation that sucks for the small people unable to fix the big system.
[+] [-] yoda_sl|14 years ago|reply
Yelp absolutely don't care about small business and how their filtering system works. My wife is running a small business and she has been facing exactly the problems described in the article. Real customers posting real reviews but quickly disappearing in the filtered reviews for unknown reasons, some of her customers have been on Yelp for a while but still their reviews are filtered, while some competitors (we guess) post a negative review with what is most likely a fake account stayed, and are never filtered out.
Like in the article, my wife was contacted by Yelp to advertise, and she declined... Soon after some of the positive reviews vanished!
Yelp until a year or so ago didn't even let business owner reply to a negative review, so the power was in the hand of the reviewer. What is worst is that even with that in place, even if a fake review is posted and advertising for a competitive business which is against their TOS, Yelp simply do not care of removing such review. Another area wher Yelp is doing a really poor job: it is still possible to review a closed business or a business that change name BUT the business owner can't reply to any such post. So the communication is borked and Yelp does't care to fix that. They do mention "freedom of speech" which my wife and I do get, but then how come someone can post a review on a close business, but the previous business owner can't reply to it?? If people are able to review but owner can't reply, it means that their back end system has some logic to handle that, but the code for the owner to reply has most likely been disabled ! Why? That's not really how freedom of speech work!
Yelp is NOT at all for promoting small business, they are in the business of selling ads and having the most page views. Trying to be a fair and honest business is not at all on their business plan.
From what I heard from other small business owner here in the Bay Area, they have experienced mostly the same.
Yelp is what I consider a SCAM and as a software engineer I will never consider a job in this unprofessional company. Sooner or later I think the truth will be shown on how Yelp manipulate their system for their own benefits.
Finally to conclude this rant, my wife business is still going on even with some negative reviews because we made sure that she was not dependent on Yelp for getting customers. She had many happy returning customers for the past 3 years, even if their positive reviews disappeared.
[+] [-] megablast|14 years ago|reply
And most people who own businesses think they are doing a good job, and don't like criticism. They take it very personally, and blame Yelp rather than the reviewer.
[+] [-] pbreit|14 years ago|reply
I'm surprised people believe that Yelp would be so clumsy and unethical to simply penalize non-advertisers.
[+] [-] termie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayne_h|14 years ago|reply
A competitor of the dog training business hires an SEO Search Engine Optimiser to increase his business. To do that they post negative reviews of all the competitors. They post fake positive reviews of their client.
I have tracked this down before. The positive reviews all looked suspiciously similar and over-glowing. I have seen the same review, the same day, by the same guy, in multiple nearby neighborhoods.
This also can happen when an SEO marketer calls and you turn him down. He then spites your site and calls back again later to see if your more agreeable....
[+] [-] mikeleeorg|14 years ago|reply
http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...
Justin G, the negative reviewer, was a Yelp Elite member from 2006-2008:
http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...
[+] [-] pbreit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantelon|14 years ago|reply
I wonder if "Elite" indicates paid? Yelp does pay, or has paid in the past, some reviewers.
[+] [-] eps|14 years ago|reply
(edit) And display the note only to those coming from Yelp.
[+] [-] marquis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhdavids8|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, which leave you more confused than when you started.
I generally read reviews to answer simple questions which the product listing does not answer. I try to find out if there are any common problems with a product.
A good FAQ and a list of the most common problems may be a better solution than pages of reviews.
[+] [-] stef25|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeleeorg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imack|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremymims|14 years ago|reply
We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be submitted by friends. They get angry at Yelp for allowing bad reviews to show up and think they can fix it with reviews written in all-caps with text like "Bob and Jane ARE THE NICEST, WARMEST, MOST AMAZING PEOPLE I KNOW and the person who wrote the review above DOESN"T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT." We always advise them not to use these tactics but to instead put a sign up asking their customers to leave reviews on Yelp (since all reviews on the site trend to 4.3, they're probably improving their position with every new review).
To recap:
- So a business has a small amount of reviews online, one negative from someone who has left more than 400 reviews.
- The business asks their loyal customers to leave positive reviews all at the same time.
- Yelp sees abnormal traffic and abnormal acceleration of overly-positive reviews from brand new users (OMG. Best Dog Trainer EVER!! A+++++ Would recommend).
- Yelp's algorithm flags this activity as abnormal since it looks similar to spam/paid/fake reviews and won't alter their algorithm to accommodate an attempt to game their system.
The reality is small businesses do this kind of "gaming" all the time and sometimes it's benign, sometimes it's malicious or fake. I once worked with a client who had left dozens of reviews about themselves and complained that Yelp always took them down which "wasn't fair". Yelp sees way more attempts at gaming reviews than you'd realize and I imagine they've gotten pretty good at it. Like Google's algorithms, Yelp's algorithms may occasionally flag real reviews. Both have an incentive to improve.
The other thing is that if I'm a sales agent at Yelp (responsible for bringing in $8k in revenue this month), I'm going to call on customers who have bad reviews (and thus show up lower in searches) first. This is not because I'm trying to scam anyone. It's because the folks at the bottom are usually the most eager to pay to show up at the top. The guys who already sit in the top 5 spots of an organic search have trouble justifying the expense. If I call on someone who is on the first page of a Yelp search, their first thought isn't going to be "this guy's trying to scam us". Likewise, the companies that buy Google ads aren't the ones who show up first in an organic search either (unless they demonstrate that the ROI justifies it. SMBs aren't typically as sophisticated).
This isn't extortion, it's not a scam, and it's not wrong. It may appear obtuse from the outside, but nothing would harm Yelp more than for these allegations to be true. It would be downright irresponsible of Yelp to try to do things this way from a shareholders' perspective.
TL;DR: SMBs try to game Yelp all the time. Yelp's built algorithms to look for this kind of behavior. This business hit a lot of triggers.
[+] [-] akashs|14 years ago|reply
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My parents had the exact same experience as in the article.
- A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from customers who were upset we had to send them letters after they didn't pay their bills.
- We encouraged people to review the business on Yelp. Despite numerous people (including a couple Yelp Elites) writing positive real reviews, interestingly, none of the reviews showed up on Yelp.
- Customers told us their reviews had not shown up, and when we called Yelp to find out why, a few reps either claimed there was no way to put the reviews back or they denied their existence. The one thing they did have in common was they promised things would be "fixed" if we advertised with them. I'm pretty sure that's closer to extortion than smart business.
- Last week, my dad finally caved and placed some ads on Yelp.
- Within an hour, there were suddenly dozens of additional reviews on there for the business, and the rating had shot up from 2 stars to 4.5 stars.
So let me ask you, if Yelp really thought those hidden reviews were trying to game the system, why were those reviews placed back when we agreed to spend some ad money? Yelp can't argue that their reviews are unbiased when stuff like this happens.
[+] [-] pessimizer|14 years ago|reply
If some business tells all of their best customers to post a review on Yelp, a site they had never used before, then they actually are straw reviews and worth nothing - and this business owner admits that. Case closed. Filter working perfectly.
This is not to say that the one bad review characterizes this man's business in any way. He probably just doesn't have a tech-savvy, hip clientele, and the first yelper he ran into may have been a spoiled curmudgeon. What offsets the damage is that since he isn't drawing from that hip clientele, the review is likely not driving away any significant business.
The best response would probably be to put a Yelp sign in some prominent space, which might trigger someone who is familiar with their business to add a few more reviews. If he gives good service, the preponderance will be good. Much better idea than calling for a favor from your affectionate regulars.
There is no right to a good reputation.
[+] [-] AppSec|14 years ago|reply
Would make me question whether or not the owner of the business receiving a positive reply is trying to game Yelp's system.
[+] [-] spaznode|14 years ago|reply
Part of my core day job work involves identifying real vs not real people and also uses the same technology to drive everything - lucene. An algorithm that refuses to attempt identification beyond what data yelp itself stores is clearly in denial of the "mountain" of data available on people in the form of public web apis on the internet. I could write an "algorithm"/analyzer that does a better job than what yelp is currently doing in a day.
At the end of the day the biggest loser in all of this is probably yelp's users. Inaccurate reviews means you're getting inaccurate results on finding places local to you...which means the tool isn't nearly as useful to you as an end consumer. They might want to just sit down and find another way to get the same sales figures without sacrificing the quality of their product. Otherwise all it will take is someone else to come along and give people the right product to put them out of business. These stories that keep appearing on the internet about Yelp are increasingly becoming harder to ignore for everyone, which is sad for all the hard working engineers at Yelp who's only desire is to deliver a kick ass product. Lame
[+] [-] yoda_sl|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Evgeny|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marquis|14 years ago|reply
I just wrote another review right now to test this out again, and my account shows I have written two with them. Why is Yelp not displaying these on their business page, and their star rating is unchanged?
[+] [-] cowkingdeluxe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0nastic|14 years ago|reply
I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site.
Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews might as well be random. If the reviews for places that I already like are this different from my own experiences, how useful can they be for places I'm thinking about going to?
It would be like if I read movie reviews from a reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse, is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their reviews useful.
[+] [-] jotr99|14 years ago|reply