Yelp: Slow Growth Lessons | Hacker News Reader

Yelp: Slow Growth Lessons

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31 pointsaj_icracked10 comments

For years, I've done the following on every yelp search: filter -> sort by -> rating.

I would probably jailbreak my phone just to be able to lock that preference in. Of course, there's a lot of money in that search option being default set to 'best' or 'recommended' or whatever it is they call it.

And, it's of course awesomely useful, and I use it constantly. But I never don't sort, that's a testament to how useful the database they've built is. It's worth like triple the effort of another search method to get the data.

i think you meant

  filter -> open now -> sort by -> rating

;)

I like to imagine I'm out at odd hours and really need to know who's open for my post-pub-crawl food. I'm going to click that as well from now on.

Sounds like a lot of marketing speak from a site that rewards a lot of review writers like myself with censorship. Once they started censoring my honest reviews, I realized the site's information was no longer useful and generally, this is proven by their rather inaccurate reviews.

Also questionable review sorting on top of the inaccurate reviews

racket.

I have a friend who is a restaurant owner. From what i've heard, their business model is to display the worst reviews and then try to extort the business owner in order to display better ones. They wanted something to the tune of several thousand dollars. He called them 'The Yelp Mafia.'

Debunked many many times. Michael Luca at HBS is one such study. Sales at Yelp has no ability to influence reviews, and Yelp employees are not allowed to even write reviews anymore.

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-y...

The most plausible explanation is that their content filtering system is just badly written and obviously can't discern between spam and real-life input, despite all usage patterns, history, and content pointing to a human. Whatever the reason, who wants to create content for a site that will then just censor it?

Slightly off-topic, but a couple of years ago I had an epiphany regarding Yelp's name. My conversation with a tech-savvy friend went something like this:

me: I realized that "Yelp" is like the "Yellow Pages".

friend: No duh.

me: No, the name "Yelp" is like "YELlo Pages". It's basically a portmanteau. [1]

friend: mind = blown

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau

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