The problem with these claims is that they all confuse ignorance with malice. These rumors are persistent because they make a sexy story, but they aren't true -- Yelp doesn't manipulate reviews based on advertising.
Citing what a Yelp sales rep is alleged to have said to a business owner sounds like compelling evidence, but it's really just garbage: Yelp sales reps have no ability to influence anything, anywhere, no matter what they say or don't say. They're part of a huge team doing a low-pay cold-calling gig -- they make a sale, ring a little bell, and hand in a piece of paper documenting the sale for the bean-counters. That's the extent of their influence with anyone.
What's really going on here is some combination of business owners mis-interpreting what a sales rep says, businesses trying to transparently game the system (and whining when it doesn't work -- business owners are amazingly stupid about this!), sales reps saying dumb things (I'm sure this happens occasionally, despite best efforts to control what they say), and the somewhat random nature of an automated review filter. There are tens of thousands of businesses being called by Yelp sales reps every day. Even if 1% of those businesses have reviews randomly filtered on the same day, that's a lot of opportunities for people to see patterns where they don't exist.
I've actually heard from other business owners also threatened by Yelp salespeople after not accepting their offer to increase ratings. Except, in the cases I've heard, the Yelp salesperson actually implicitly threatened a decrease in ratings if the business did not buy ads.
Regardless of whether these salespeople have the power to do so or not, it's not entirely ethical business practice. And this leads to business owners unaware of the review filtering algorithm who have encountered these shady salespeople to try to find correlation between the two and end up pointing fingers at Yelp.
So I wouldn't say Yelp is free of blame in these situations, they should be more readily firing these salespeople and shouldn't have a culture that encourages their salespeople to act this way.
You can't just brush off sales reps claiming to be able to improve reviews. If Yelp isn't paying them enough and getting crap, that's Yelp's fault. If Yelp has out-sourced his to someone else, they have out-sourced their reputation.[1]
I agree with most of what you say, but this is vastly overstated: "There are tens of thousands of businesses being called by Yelp sales reps every day."
If they call 30K businesses a day, they would call every single business in the US in 3 years.
This is a recurring story that does not go away. Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action.
Further, I judge people by their actions, not their intent. "Oh, you didn't mean to shoot me in the face? No problem!"
My two heresy anecdotes...
My buddy has a restaurant. He's always playing cat and mouse with the Yelp reviews. He claims Yelp buries the positive reviews and that he's been told they would reorder the reviews, for a price.
More worrisome is my doctor's story. I checked my doctor's Yelp review. Doctor is trashed. Which surprised me, because this doctor is great. So I ask about it. Doctor claims reviewer was a disgruntled patient looking for pain medication for migraines, which is something this doctor (a neurologist) does not do. So doctor contacts Yelp. Sorry, sir, there's nothing we can do. Perhaps you'd like to buy some advertising, we can adjust the results.
I infer from your comments that there would be no way to prove based on review display that Yelp was providing review relief if you pay for advertising, right? You basically have to trust their algo?
I'm not surprised by this. Writing reviews or mentions yourself or getting others to astroturf for your product is essential to getting started nowadays.
If you build a business model that knowingly showcases the worst ignorance of an anonymous Internet public, and ask for money to help mitigate the inevitable damage, how is that any different from a protection racket?
If the claims are true, it's a big deal. Losing half a star on Yelp can translate into 20 percent fewer people coming to your restaurant on a busy Friday night, according to a study by two UC Berkeley economists: http://www.dailycal.org/2012/09/06/online-customer-reviews-a...
This is not the first, second, or third time such allegations have been raised, but they always devolve into he-said/she-said.
Restauranteurs, when you're calling Yelp to ask about missing reviews, RECORD THE CONVERSATION! One recording of a Yelp rep saying something like that is game over.
An important distinction here - the allegations don't just devolve into he-said/she-said: they've been outright dismissed, with prejudice, by courts of law as without merit.
Yelp has tens of thousands of paying business customers, and yet with all the sensationalistic media play this type of story somehow continues to generate, no one has ever produced empirical evidence of a single documented case of pay-for-play. I'll also point out that there are at least three former Yelp engineers on this thread - some of whom didn't even like working at the company - who are steadfastly defending Yelp's business practices as legitimate and above-board.
By all means, record it if it happens. But don't hold your breath.
One recording of a Yelp rep saying something like that is one instance of a sales guy lying to make a sale so he can get a commission or make a quota. You know, something that happens all the time.
Yelp could never manipulate reviews and this restaurant owner could have been told exactly what he claims. The two things aren't mutually incompatible.
Just remember that California is a two-party consent state when it comes to wiretapping- if the other party does not know and understand that you are recording the conversation, it will not be admissible in court proceedings.
Only if you're stuck treating people as one homogenous glob.
If you let people self-identify by interests (+french food, -foodie, +fine-dining) you can easily get actionable recommendations and minimize noise. The trick is that adding specificity exposes how small your user base is. And when you're dealing with an inherently local industry, even a massive user-base can start to look small when it's sliced up geographically and then by interest.
Looking at their yelp page, they do have 5 star reviews, and they also have 1 star reviews. There are few filtered reviews, but they aren't universally high ratings or anything, and I think Yelp does filter out users with a single review that is 5 stars because they are usually fake.
I'm also sure that a restaurant feels that recent reviews should be weighted heavily, almost exclusively, and that those two star reviews from last year should be ignored.
> I'm also sure that a restaurant feels that recent reviews should be weighted heavily, almost exclusively, and that those two star reviews from last year should be ignored.
I agree 100% with that. It's very possible for a restaurant to get better or go downhill in a year.
If a restaurant has a rough opening but drastically improves after a few months, the early 1-star reviews can do some serious long-term damage even if they're a year old.
It seems that Yelp is turning into something like the BBB, ultimately holding the good name of organizations hostage, whether or not that was the original intent.
I think that's a little unfair. Yes, there have been some instances of that happening with the BBB... but when one of their sales people contacted me to sign up to become a BBB accredited business, I asked if it would affect my rating negatively if I refused, and the sales person was very adamant that it would not. So I declined, but she updated my profile with how long I was in business (adding an extra 3 years), and that improved my rating from A- to A+. Which is my company's current rating, even though I have never given them a dime.. all I do is respond to customers who file complaints with them.
Technically speaking, there's nothing to stop Yelp from manipulating results within their search engine, just like there's nothing to stop Google.
I mean we all think Google doesn't mess with search rankings but we all know they do (see the google blog post about catching Microsoft by inserting fake long-tail search results).
In short, does Yelp do this? I don't see why not; there's basically no way for anyone to verify whether Yelp does this unless they get to dive into emails for discovery in a big trial. Then again, I have to think Yelp has enough integrity not to mess with results; but my point is you would never know except through hearsay and gossip.
For the record - I used to be a an Engineering Manager at Yelp, and I've had my Yelp work emails searched in discovery during big lawsuits about the review filter. So did all of my colleagues. The result of all that should speak for itself.
I think the reasoning is that showing ads, and marking them as such, is just fine. Bumping scores that are marked as customer reviews just because the business is buying ads would not be fine. This is not the first time that someone has accused Yelp of doing the latter in addition to the former.
The ads Google sells are marked as advertising. Spam isn't; it's usually not too hard to tell, but it mucks up the search result space.
"Featured reviews" for paying customers essentially become a form of paid advertising, but they are not clearly marked as such. That puts them closer to the spam side than the ad side.
Don't know if the accusations are true but I would take Yelp reviews with many grains of salt. Its not the truth I question rather its the extreme subjectivity.
Some people care about service, some don't; some care about decor, some don't. Different people have different tastes as well as different price sensitivity.
Yelp reviewers are also self selecting both in who is more prone to write reviews and under which circumstances that will drive someone to write reviews.
So if you really want to figure out how good a place is for you, by all means use Yelp as a resource. But you need to review the reviewers to see what their leanings and expertise are and then read their reviews with that understanding in mind.
"Its not the truth I question rather its the extreme subjectivity."
How do you solve this problem? It's endemic to user-generated content. Of course reviews of everything aren't objective fact. They're inherently skewed by opinion by even the most professional paid reviewer.
While I've seen the filtered reviews issue and think the claims are somewhat true, my bigger problem is that yelp does nothing for reviewer quality.
So many times, I've seen blatantly false and misleading information tacked on to someone's reviews. The site allows both the microcomments "Food, okay. Waitresses, hot." and the long, trailing rants about how the steak tasted rotten. This is a problem, and not one easily fixed. Being an "Elite Reviewer" just means you give out more idiotic reviews than the rest.
Yelp is a joke to anyone who really cares about food.
"my bigger problem is that yelp does nothing for reviewer quality"
What do you expect from user-generated content?
"Yelp is a joke to anyone who really cares about food."
It's really not. You take the reviews into aggregate, it's very easy to screen out the idiots and fickle eaters. Don't pay attention to the ratings, pay attention to the depictions in the reviews.
Right. I don't see any problem with INITIAL reviews being held in a queue based on the user's participation level. With more participation reviews get unfiltered.
Criticizing Yelp's algorithm is fine, but people don't understand how it actually works, nor do they have the patience to figure it out. Full transparency would be nice, but that would defeat the purpose to having it to screen out the fakers and SEO spammers.
I would like to remind people that this is not the first or even second time that this kind of claim has flaired up regarding biased reviews, corrupted reviews, purchased reviews, and extortionary practices.
I would also caveat though that there is a plausible possibility that this is an attempt at mobbing Yelp.
I have always felt that reviews are ripe for disruption and a bit of an ethics and authority treatment.
[+] [-] timr|13 years ago|reply
Citing what a Yelp sales rep is alleged to have said to a business owner sounds like compelling evidence, but it's really just garbage: Yelp sales reps have no ability to influence anything, anywhere, no matter what they say or don't say. They're part of a huge team doing a low-pay cold-calling gig -- they make a sale, ring a little bell, and hand in a piece of paper documenting the sale for the bean-counters. That's the extent of their influence with anyone.
What's really going on here is some combination of business owners mis-interpreting what a sales rep says, businesses trying to transparently game the system (and whining when it doesn't work -- business owners are amazingly stupid about this!), sales reps saying dumb things (I'm sure this happens occasionally, despite best efforts to control what they say), and the somewhat random nature of an automated review filter. There are tens of thousands of businesses being called by Yelp sales reps every day. Even if 1% of those businesses have reviews randomly filtered on the same day, that's a lot of opportunities for people to see patterns where they don't exist.
[+] [-] robrenaud|13 years ago|reply
I don't know about the Thai restaurant owner, but I certainly trust JWZ. http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/
[+] [-] makeramen|13 years ago|reply
Regardless of whether these salespeople have the power to do so or not, it's not entirely ethical business practice. And this leads to business owners unaware of the review filtering algorithm who have encountered these shady salespeople to try to find correlation between the two and end up pointing fingers at Yelp.
So I wouldn't say Yelp is free of blame in these situations, they should be more readily firing these salespeople and shouldn't have a culture that encourages their salespeople to act this way.
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.popehat.com/2011/12/27/outsource-your-marketing-o...
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|13 years ago|reply
If they call 30K businesses a day, they would call every single business in the US in 3 years.
http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html
[+] [-] specialist|13 years ago|reply
This is a recurring story that does not go away. Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action.
Further, I judge people by their actions, not their intent. "Oh, you didn't mean to shoot me in the face? No problem!"
My two heresy anecdotes...
My buddy has a restaurant. He's always playing cat and mouse with the Yelp reviews. He claims Yelp buries the positive reviews and that he's been told they would reorder the reviews, for a price.
More worrisome is my doctor's story. I checked my doctor's Yelp review. Doctor is trashed. Which surprised me, because this doctor is great. So I ask about it. Doctor claims reviewer was a disgruntled patient looking for pain medication for migraines, which is something this doctor (a neurologist) does not do. So doctor contacts Yelp. Sorry, sir, there's nothing we can do. Perhaps you'd like to buy some advertising, we can adjust the results.
Straight up extortion.
[+] [-] pgrote|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|13 years ago|reply
Friend 1: Have you tried getting some positive reviews on the internet? People really trust them, it really helps to drive business.
Friend 2: Oh, really? How many reviews do you have?
Friend 1: About twenty.
Friend 2: How many of them did you write yourself?
Friend 1: (Laughs) About nineteen of them.
[+] [-] frakkingcylons|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devgutt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkharris|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d0mine|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnygoods|13 years ago|reply
Restauranteurs, when you're calling Yelp to ask about missing reviews, RECORD THE CONVERSATION! One recording of a Yelp rep saying something like that is game over.
[+] [-] seekup|13 years ago|reply
Yelp has tens of thousands of paying business customers, and yet with all the sensationalistic media play this type of story somehow continues to generate, no one has ever produced empirical evidence of a single documented case of pay-for-play. I'll also point out that there are at least three former Yelp engineers on this thread - some of whom didn't even like working at the company - who are steadfastly defending Yelp's business practices as legitimate and above-board.
By all means, record it if it happens. But don't hold your breath.
[+] [-] gyardley|13 years ago|reply
Yelp could never manipulate reviews and this restaurant owner could have been told exactly what he claims. The two things aren't mutually incompatible.
[+] [-] evan_|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|13 years ago|reply
Well, this is how it works more or less
I've never had a comment on Yelp taken down
Well, as other comment says, the problem is the 'idiots'.
There's always someone that thinks McD is the epitome of gourmet food and thinks anything that's not overspiced/overMSGd is "bland"
There's always someone that thinks that a place with tacky decoration and a queue in front and rude bouncers is "the place to be"
So it's really like herding cats.
[+] [-] roc|13 years ago|reply
If you let people self-identify by interests (+french food, -foodie, +fine-dining) you can easily get actionable recommendations and minimize noise. The trick is that adding specificity exposes how small your user base is. And when you're dealing with an inherently local industry, even a massive user-base can start to look small when it's sliced up geographically and then by interest.
[+] [-] astrodust|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|13 years ago|reply
I'm also sure that a restaurant feels that recent reviews should be weighted heavily, almost exclusively, and that those two star reviews from last year should be ignored.
[+] [-] nnnnni|13 years ago|reply
I agree 100% with that. It's very possible for a restaurant to get better or go downhill in a year.
If a restaurant has a rough opening but drastically improves after a few months, the early 1-star reviews can do some serious long-term damage even if they're a year old.
[+] [-] error54|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdesq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrenner|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josh2600|13 years ago|reply
I mean we all think Google doesn't mess with search rankings but we all know they do (see the google blog post about catching Microsoft by inserting fake long-tail search results).
In short, does Yelp do this? I don't see why not; there's basically no way for anyone to verify whether Yelp does this unless they get to dive into emails for discovery in a big trial. Then again, I have to think Yelp has enough integrity not to mess with results; but my point is you would never know except through hearsay and gossip.
There's no ChillingEffects for Yelp Reviews.
[+] [-] seekup|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bickfordb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedufer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Millennium|13 years ago|reply
"Featured reviews" for paying customers essentially become a form of paid advertising, but they are not clearly marked as such. That puts them closer to the spam side than the ad side.
[+] [-] babesh|13 years ago|reply
Some people care about service, some don't; some care about decor, some don't. Different people have different tastes as well as different price sensitivity.
Yelp reviewers are also self selecting both in who is more prone to write reviews and under which circumstances that will drive someone to write reviews.
So if you really want to figure out how good a place is for you, by all means use Yelp as a resource. But you need to review the reviewers to see what their leanings and expertise are and then read their reviews with that understanding in mind.
[+] [-] illuminate|13 years ago|reply
How do you solve this problem? It's endemic to user-generated content. Of course reviews of everything aren't objective fact. They're inherently skewed by opinion by even the most professional paid reviewer.
[+] [-] pyre|13 years ago|reply
http://foodbeast.com.nyud.net/content/2013/04/22/sf-restaura...
[+] [-] slashedzero|13 years ago|reply
So many times, I've seen blatantly false and misleading information tacked on to someone's reviews. The site allows both the microcomments "Food, okay. Waitresses, hot." and the long, trailing rants about how the steak tasted rotten. This is a problem, and not one easily fixed. Being an "Elite Reviewer" just means you give out more idiotic reviews than the rest.
Yelp is a joke to anyone who really cares about food.
[+] [-] illuminate|13 years ago|reply
What do you expect from user-generated content?
"Yelp is a joke to anyone who really cares about food."
It's really not. You take the reviews into aggregate, it's very easy to screen out the idiots and fickle eaters. Don't pay attention to the ratings, pay attention to the depictions in the reviews.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] swayvil|13 years ago|reply
It's done by selective promotion, censorship, filtering, etc. "Boing Boing" is one famous culprit if I recall correctly.
The owners argue "it's my forum so I have the right; and besides I'm not censoring I'm unpublishing" or some such nonsense.
I'm sure it can get very sneaky. fake democracy.
[+] [-] stefap2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] illuminate|13 years ago|reply
Criticizing Yelp's algorithm is fine, but people don't understand how it actually works, nor do they have the patience to figure it out. Full transparency would be nice, but that would defeat the purpose to having it to screen out the fakers and SEO spammers.
[+] [-] pspeter3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TylerE|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahsd|13 years ago|reply
I would also caveat though that there is a plausible possibility that this is an attempt at mobbing Yelp.
I have always felt that reviews are ripe for disruption and a bit of an ethics and authority treatment.
[+] [-] beachstartup|13 years ago|reply
looking restaurants / dry cleaners / whatever up in google and/or apple maps is pretty much useless when you're on the go.
whereas on yelp, you simply enter the name (or ethnic category), click on the map, and there you go.
quite frankly i stopped using yelp for reviews as soon as the idiots took over. /hipster
[+] [-] epoxyhockey|13 years ago|reply
I have too. My preferred method of searching for "good" restaurants is:
1) Viewing reviews on Opentable when making reservations (to discover which dishes are good)
2) Looking at the Zagat rating when clicking on a restaurant in Google maps (which is more analogous to a hotel's star rating and is more objective)