What precisely are you guys doing to ensure review authenticity? This is the number one reason I ignore all reviews all the internet but Yelp.
Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher.
Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.
First and of course, look at the overall number of reviews and score as a rough guideline. You're probably not going to get burned going to a place with 700 reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Might not be as good as its reviews, but it's probably not crap.
Second, ignore any review with the word "groupon" or "scoutmob" in it. For whatever reason these always seem to be nitpicks about service specifically related to the offer. And if I had a dollar for every "Groupon was for item A, I wanted to apply it to item B, they wouldn't, one star" I've seen, I'd be a wealthy man.
Third, ignore most of the five star and one star reviews. Mostly undeserved gushing, and angry ranting, respectively.
Fourth, generally avoid anything from a user that has "Yelp Elite" next to their names. While some of these are good reviews from informed food enthusiasts, a lot of them are just long-winded twee crap from folks who like the idea of being "elite" at something.
Finally (and most importantly), pay special attention to the two and three star reviews. This is the meat of Yelp. They will say moderately bad things about the restaurant, usually with reasons to back it up. Often you'll start to see a theme. Whatever issues the restaurant has, this is where you'll find them. This is where you'll find out the popular place for some cuisine is actually kind of mediocre and everyone familiar with that cuisine goes somewhere else that's less popular but has better food, or whatever.
Then you ask yourself, "Is this something I care about?" If I want the best Ćevapi in town, do I really care about the dozen two and three star reviews that complain that the waiters only speak Croatian? Or will I show up with my handy Croatian phrasebook?
Yelp is a pit of crap, but there's gold in that crap. Usually.
I find that's often the case on Amazon as well. On your typical book review, say, there are a lot of 4s or 5s that are gushing praise because it's someone's favored author or genre or whatever. 1s tend to be "It sucked. Read 10 pages and threw it out."
2s and 3s as you say are more likely to be along the lines of "Really tried to like it because it had good ideas and I've liked author X in the past but this book was just too disjoined and confusing to recommend it."
But I agree that it all pales in comparison to amateur enthusiast communities and specialist blogs.
If you’re not in an area where that’s a risk, it’s not a good way to find -good- food, but it’s a good way to find the best local mainstream food. If the local mainstream best is mediocre... yeah, it’ll be 5 stars on yelp.
It would also be nice if you could rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately. But you can’t, so it’s meaningless.
Which is what Zagat was like initially.
No, they don't. This is a rumor that is often repeated, but is never backed with evidence that goes beyond hearsay.
Also, I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.
Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least.
Yelp has turned these attacks away in court, but the (apparent) last ruling on this seemed to come down to an inability on the plaintiffs' side to prove Yelp actually changes review visibility based on advertising [1].
It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation. But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms. It's not like I'm using Reddit posts to support anti-vax arguments, small business owners can definitely reason about how Yelp operates from their interactions with it.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/11/people-keep-suing-yelp-over-it...
No, the "evidence" exists entirely in hearsay form. All you ever see are stories about parents, friends of friends, distant cousins, and so on. There's almost never so much as a link to the business page. Why? Because it's trivial to debunk these claims when you can see the reviews.
"It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation."
Not just silly, but absurd. It's internet conspiracy theory, and people are just thoughtlessly repeating it as fact.
"But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms."
If Yelp revealed how reviews are filtered, the filters would be rendered useless overnight. It would be the equivalent of Google publicly documenting their search algorithm. And while I think Yelp does many things badly when it comes to this stuff, they're 100% clear about how reviews and ads interact: they don't.
I wouldn't expect there to be a literal code switch that deletes bad reviews if someone pays for ads. But I can imagine a system developing naturally (even by accident!) where it's easier to get a human at Yelp to intervene when non-customers or bots left bad reviews.
Did Yelp have systems in place (e.g. a "Chinese wall") to prevent someone's status as a customer from impacting their ability to resolve a complaint about abusive negative reviews?
Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.
I’ve also found many 4+ star restaurants entirely overrated and quite mediocre.
It’s all about the category and how it fits into the local milieux, which might place emphasis on things you don’t care about or expect (the ambiance sucks at el faro, for example, but it’s a lunchtime tacqueria I could care less). People take away stars from it because it’s cash only. Sorry, but what exactly is it that we’re rating here?
That lack of common consensus and the wide disparity between expectations means yelp aggregates aren’t always so useful. I wish they did a better job of showing me the reviews and stars of the things that matter to me, not to the shapeless aggregate. Or at least give me a sense of the distribution to know if there’s more/less contention than normal.
Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.
A while ago there was large thread on Reddit asking anyone who had eaten at the Olive Garden in Times Square, why[1] they had chosen to eat there. There were people who thought it was one of the funniest questions that they'd ever read on /r/askreddit, and people who didn't understand why it was an interesting or funny question.
Byant Park Grill is a nearby restaurant that is not a tiny hole in the wall, and the dishes are not that exotic. For context, here are two dishes that are on today's menu at the different restaurants:
- Bryant Park Grill[2]
$28.50 - Grilled Soy Honey Glazed Atlantic Salmon
"stir fried broccoli, snow peas, carrots, roasted potatoes, soy ginger butter sauce"
- Olive Garden Times Square
$27.79 - Salmon Piccata[3]
"Grilled salmon topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Served with parmesan-crusted zucchini"
The prices are not extremely different, the wait times are similar if you show up at the door, and it would be naïve to think that Olive Garden hasn't put a lot of thought and research into exactly how they make their food. I wouldn't be surprised if the diners at Bryant Park Grill are even disappointed in their meals more often than the diners at Olive Garden, but I suppose they also think something is above average more often at Bryant Park Grill and occasionally excellent.
The same people at Bryant Park Grill might go to Olive Garden, but it is to bring a group of their summer interns for a celebration or maybe when dining out with elderly family members. When they travel with their own families, they avoid chain restaurants and look for either a generic diner, or a restaurant that has been recommended verbally by a local or someone working at the desk at a hotel.
How do people who consider something like the Bryant Park Grill a large restaurant with a safe, but not exceptional menu quickly find the equivalent somewhere like Palo Alto? I feel like asking a dozen people between 30 and 60 would find them all suggesting the same two or three restaurants, but review sites never seem to be able to do this. Instead, sites like Yelp seem to have a lot of reviewers who are talking about themselves as tastemakers, who pride themselves on discovering secret gems, and being offended by something weird at places that have favorable word-of-mouth reputations.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors... [2] http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ [3] https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028
It would be interesting to see what happened if it were limited to a subset of people who used OpenTable for minimum number of reservations per year or some other metric, and then was based on a Keynesian Beauty Contest[1], where a consensus is divined by reviewers earning prizes for correctly guessing which restaurants other reviewers like.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=CfS7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=P...