Yelp craters 30% as advertisers abandon the site
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Service Providers: Homeadvisor, Angie's List
No, it's not. Google sold Zagat in March to The Infatuation.
yelp's review quality has been on the decline as of late though. it used to be great
Google Reviews of the Pacific Ocean.
The lack of good data on Yelp in the U.K. has indirectly hurt other players there too, when Apple maps first launched business location information was largely drawn from Yelp, which basically seeded Apple maps with very bad information. Locations were wrong, many businesses that simply didn’t exist anymore would appear. Granted it’s been years since I last checked, but in the first few years of Apple map’s operation it was a pretty significant issue. This methodology worked great in Cupertino I guess...
It’s really frustrating as sometimes searching for “Mexican restaurant” won’t include all Mexican restaurants in the map area. And will include random weird stuff. And it won’t show the top items.
[1]https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...
I was recently trying to find the best fish restaurant in Key West and TripAdvisor was all over results with the same stupid results.
What I've noticed is if you ask a random stranger what the 'best' is, you get the same generic, expensive fusion something made into a paste cuisine. If you ask their favorite, you find small, off-the-wall places with terrible selection, but amazing food.
They are at a tremendous disadvantage as a 'web' experience because you're getting there through Google, Facebook, or Bing rather than landing directly on their page so they have already paid that platform to put you in front. The App means they have full control over the experience and can charge restaurants directly to move them around in the search results (more revenue).
So at some point I presume the go full "Yellow Pages" and just charge venues a monthly fee to appear at all in their pages. That works if they are generating significant foot traffic into the venue but fails if they can't connect the app/website use with the visit.
All in all I don't see how they can make a business here.
I think it's useful at this point to ask why various directories had value during their heyday. The "Yellow Pages" had value, simply because there wasn't as comprehensive a localized listing otherwise. Yelp had value at first, because the reviews and ratings combined with the location search were super useful. Unfortunately, too many people realized how valuable this was and the gaming of the system on all sides started, greatly reducing the usefulness of the Yelp directory.
Google might be able to create a such directory based solely on traffic and AI identification of the type of business? Could AI identify long lines outside of restaurants? Maybe Google should buy Yelp, which would solve the "pay Google up front" conundrum. Whatever IP Yelp has which killed the "near" searches on Google would also cease to be an impediment to Google.
Google already gives you the hours that restaurants are busiest, so they basically have this info
I suspect that AI applied here would be highly useful.
Busyness wouldn't just be used as a measure of busyness. It could be used as a proxy for other qualities. Another example: There are restaurants that have ample waiting areas and others that have none. Those in the waiting area wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing to a customer's experience than the same people seated at a table. Likewise for people standing outside vs. waiting inside.
At a very basic level, throughput (Little's Law) should also be taken into account.
My point is there would be value in such proxy measures, if some AI were used for interpretation.
I'm not sure if this is exactly it or if you're letting Yelp off the hook. Yelp was perfectly happy to try to profit from the gaming. That didn't just damage its usefulness. It damaged trust; and trust is a lot harder to get back.
Not letting them off the hook. Yelp contributed to this through their actions.
It damaged trust; and trust is a lot harder to get back.
That was a part of what I was thinking about. One advantage of the Yellow Pages: less opportunity to lose trust. I think displaying AI interpreted traffic has a key advantage over ratings: It would cost a whole lot more money to get crowds to show up day after day with smartphones, than it would cost to get people to astroturf ratings.
Google already does plenty of stuff like this, and has for years (including historical and live busyness). Hell, I haven't used Yelp in years, because their app is generally less usable, isn't integrated with Maps (for directions etc), and cripples mobile web by not letting you see most of the content. Though it's possible that the data for G Maps is only comparably rich because of my location, and that Yelp has a data advantage in many more markets.
I'm well aware. There's a cousin comment about using such data with contextual information and AI to use traffic data as a proxy for attributes like popularity and quality, instead of providing the raw data and letting users make their own inferences. This would enable a more Yelp-like UX, and might be easier for lots of users to consume.
They did this in response to Google. Their clicks from the google search results has been down for years [1]. What should they have done?
[1] https://www.seroundtable.com/yelp-ceo-on-google-interstitial...
Create a service people will actually want to use?
They got a penalty for creating a frustrating experience, so they replaced it with another kind of frustrating experience?
They did. It worked great and was awesome. One day, a large company changed it's rules removing most of the traffic pointed to it. It had to make changes. One attempt to survive was to move traffic to the app. I don't understand why trying to survive as a business is bad. Maybe people didn't want to click the close button on the app link -- I don't see how this should end Yelp and let google have more unchecked power to the small business reviews.
People would seek out Yelp directly. But even the search term "Yelp" itself it down roughly 50% since 2014, suggesting that less and less people would actively and directly seek out that page.
When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user.
Right. Like Amazon not needing roads. Or Walgreens needing a working Pharmacological system.
"When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user."
Ugh. Yes. That is called a monopoly.
So this is the behavior as GOOGLE:
1) Remove all traffic to site
2) Re-create same site on Google
3) Point all traffic that was in 1) to google.
4) The site will try to move traffic to mobile -- but users will just get upset at the site. Because the interstitial is hard to tap on.
Is this really all they need todo to capture users? Sad.
The sentence you replied to wasn't even tangentially related to the definition of a monopoly. It is something every search engine should do whether they have a monopoly or not, which is ranking things highly that are most useful to me. Sites hiding stuff behind interstitials just aren't.
Now Google sure aren't angels, but the "penalizing interstitials" part hardly is the evil part.
It might've been the creation of a competing product with a decent user experience that was evil. But then yelp was hardly sitting on a secret sauce. A 10 year old with 1 year of programming experience can build a review portal, and it'll likely be more pleasant to use than one that is intentionally crippled by it's owners.
And when cancelling the prompt gets you nothing, it really feels like Yelp is screaming “NO SOUP FOR YOU!”.
Not every iOS user is using Safari!!!!
Maybe it's not a thing anymore?
Being prompted repeatedly to open in app is certainly annoying but at present most mobile users probably use one of the apps. At least for android where 85% of your global market lives there are 7 different options nearly all of which are better than viewing in mobile firefox/chrome.
In short your experience is valid but since you probably represent a small percentage of the userbase reports of reddits death are still presumably greatly exaggerated.
On android I like Reddit is fun
Here is a thread discussing a replacement on ios
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/5w4885/ios_replacem...
On the lighter side old reddits code was open source and lives on in voat which at present is infested with a lot of racists and alt right. Maybe we can all move over and "voat" them out of their new home like we kicked them off reddit.
I don't think people are forecasting Reddit's death so much as wishing for it and asking for alternatives they can go to instead.
I don't think Reddit will ever really die. It will persist, as a sort of night-club district from the comparatively well lit streets of Facebook and Twitter. It's not really a red light district anymore, but it's edgy enough for most people.
I worked at reddit for almost 4 years, but quit and started a non-profit so I could work on building a site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality content, etc.
It's not incredibly active yet since it's in invite-only alpha, but it gets several hundred posts a day and is coming along well. There's more info in this blog post (including how to request an invite): https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Just send me an email if you're interested and I'll give you an invite. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled for now while we get base features and site culture built up.
I used to ask myself that question, then I realized it doesn't matter. Communities come and go. Slashdot used to be good. Reddit used to be good. That they're not anymore doesn't matter.
It sucks to up and leave a community once in a while, but it's not like you lose everything you did there. Social apps are intrinsically focused on the short term (past & future). It's okay to change which websites you visit once in a while.
I highly recommend Tildes. I enjoy my time there. It's pretty quiet and has very high signal, very low noise. If one day it has to be shut down because the bills can't be paid, that will suck… but there will be others.
Hopefully Tor isn't a problem. In the Age Of Snowden, I use it almost exclusively. Also might I suggest a .onion gateway (and maybe a .i2p gateway too)?
No, no I don't. And the official reddit app is not the best experience.
I already ran to Relay as an escape from Reddit's astonishingly garbage mobile browser experience. Next stop is the door.
Apollo recently moved some push notification features behind a subscription to cover ongoing costs, separate from their "Pro" one time in-app purchase, so I think Reddit is at least taking a cut from API usage by other clients.
I'd be happy to pay them, but I actually don't WANT push notifications, posting from the app, or any of the other stuff that encourages websites to pull you in deeper.
And the only reason I even use Apollo is because mobile Reddit is a nightmare UX. Literally a case study in how to make a horrid, horrible experience on the mobile web.
Often when I "open in the app", I just get sent to the homepage of my app with no way to find the random post I had been trying to view.
t. Tumblr marketing department
There is no site (other than my own) so unique that I can't find a replacement.
.snackbar
.xpromopopup
.topbutton
.xpromopillwww.reddit.com##.xpromopill
www.reddit.com##.active.xpromopopup
www.reddit.com##.amp.snackbar
www.reddit.com##.navframe > .xpromominimal.dualpartinterstitial
www.reddit.com##.xpromoadfeed
And apps can track more details about you, yielding more revenue (or potential revenue to an acquirer).
Investors probably ascribe more value to apps-based services than web-based.
Personally, if I'm on a web page, I am actually much more likely to never install their app if I have a bad experience.
Companies like reddit and yelp are not focused on the customer experience. They're trying to boost their KPIs. Perhaps, early on, those were customer-centric, but we now live in an age where a path to revenue is more important than ever.
So we get obnoxious nagware. The only thing is to look elsewhere.
But I think it's too late.
Also, small pro-tip for anyone unaware. If you are on mobile web and on Yelp, but don't want to download the app, hold down the refresh button, and select 'Request Desktop Site' - this will load the non mobile version of the site that will not force you to download the app. The UI isn't as great as the mobile optimized site, but hey at least you can read reviews without being extorted into downloading an app.
The article is talking about their financial struggles but they are too cheap and lazy to maintain multiple platforms?
In the top left, there's an "open in app" button. It's not very intrusive, it's just sitting there in the header to remind you that there's an app. The rest of the website looks usable, right? Nope.
Click on "open in app": redirected to app store
Click on user's avatar: redirected to app store
Click on "read more": redirected to app store
Click on one of the reactions: redirected to app store
It's dishonest because the site isn't interactive at all -- there's a huge overlay that prevents any meaningful interaction with the site. It's quite the opposite of lazy, because there's a functional site under there, they just refuse to let people use it.
Personally, I've never understood it, since nearly every mobile website is terrible. I prefer installing the app.
Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
If you don't like it, why not?
It's akin to having to install a program on your laptop to view a website instead of using the browser.
And if you can structure a restaurant review site for mobile, you have no business building anything.
I am not saying most users think like that, providing anecdotal feedback here.
So it's not exactly that Sony wants or is even asking for your location, it's Google telling you that if you give the sony app the BLE or wifi scanning functionality it wants, it would be possible for them to figure out where you're at.
That warning means they could, and so google is telling you, not that they are.
Some are more affected of the issues, some less.
> Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
No.
They're working on it but it's a hard problem because too many app developers, especially at household-name companies, have a history of acting in bad faith. When you're prompted to install an app you're really having to guess whether it'll chew batter or metered data, or attempt to exploit your personal data.
The OS vendors are offering better controls but it takes time to rebuild trust, especially when they're not sure whether the OS vendor quietly makes exceptions for major companies. Remember when Uber was violating Apple's policies and had no punishment for it? People will remember that for years even if they've had strict compliance ever since.
Mobile websites are easier to install, fine to use for anything that doesn't require specific hardware permissions, and then when the user stops using them they stay gone. Not to mention they work on my Linux machine and my Windows machine and my iPad and my Galaxy. Forget apps.
Downloading an app can take an unpredictable amount of time and bandwidth, and once you download it you may have to log in, remember or set a password, deal with 2FA, click a verification email, etc. .
like you don't have to do those on a website?
The only sites that need this are those where users are adding content and the site is moderated, and then login should only be required for moderated actions.
So Yelp should require a login to leave a review, but not to read one.
And that's besides the other objections that I've seen others write here.
Speaking from the experience of my spouse (fancy iPhone user) and I (low-end Android user) -- both our phones are normally out of memory. We take lots of family photos and videos, which fill up our phones and are tedious to delete or back up. So downloading a new app means first we have to delete something else.
A secondary but lesser reason is notifications. I know that every app will require a minute or two of effort to locate the notification settings and switch them all off.
I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.
The Yelp app has no means of doing that.
Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.
I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.
Because of Yelp's frustrating site restrictions, I find myself often using Google instead, even though I prefer Yelp!!!!!!
How ridiculous is that!!
Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.
So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.
Yeah, you're right. Yelp sucks. But ya have to believe, in time, someone will put the user first and get the experience correct.
I'm sure the interface for advertisers must be pleasant, though.
On-page search, copy-and-paste, and bookmarking deep in the content come for free.
The back button will behave predictably.
The browser engine has had a lot of bulletproofing on it; by comparison a lot of apps are unstable.
Updates are completely automatic- no "here's a 500mb update you won't get until weeks from now when you get to a Wifi hotspot."
Because it means I'll be prompted for the App Store password, which I probably won't remember (or will get wrong 3 times) and so will need to change it, but the process won't let me change the password to anything I've used in the past 12 months (so I cannot change it to whatever I though the password was). So I need to make up a whole new password, and that means my mail and everything else linked to the account will stop working on all my other devices and I'll need to update the account passwords on those too.
It's not 2011 anymore, back when the mobile web was trash because companies maintained both a desktop site and a severly gimped "m.desktop.com" site. Back then you pretty much had to have apps if you wanted to capture the mobile market.
Today, we have mature Add to Home Screen capability, GPS support, push notifications, widespread support for CSS3 hardware acceleration, PWAs, offline capabilities and much more.
You can now make Uber and Lyft trips on the mobile web. That is a use case where I had previously thought I would always need to have the app installed.
So with that in mind, why would I even want to open the dumpster fire that is Google Play/App Store in 2018? If it's a new company I haven't heard of, I am sure as hell not about to open the app store and download > 50MB on my data plan to check you out.
Feels weird to applaud add to home screen but not want the app. Also im on wifi so often that i guess 50mb to download an app is a non issue for me.
I am biased because I build native apps vs web apps but ive always preferred a rich native experience and design vs the web. To each their own!
>Note: This document pertains to OS X only. Notifications for websites do not appear on iOS.
[1] : https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...
P.S: not assuming IOS is mobile, yes assuming significant amount of mobile economy is IOS browsers
For me, the "add to home screen" means the PWA launches in fullscreen without any browser chrome and that helps the experience a lot. My home screen gets a tiny bit more cluttered but that's an acceptable tradeoff.
Note: I'm not saying that you suck. You have an identity and worth separate from native apps.
I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.
The Yelp app has no means of doing that.
Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.
Often not all text in Apps is selectable and copy paste-able.
I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.
Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.
So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.
I think some apps feel nicer than a website ever could (because the app can take advantage of stuff like force touches better, and offer a nice custom usage of gestures). But some other places it really just feels like the app exists to push notifications...
This has happened to me more than once, with Quora being the latest offender. I don't mind the broken app links, but at least add a query param to the URL and set a cookie so that you don't show a popup and ruin the experience for your existing users.
Er, just checked and the Google Pay Send and Request money feature is accessible from both mobile and desktop site (well, I was lazy and checked both from mobile using “view desktop site” on and off.)
So, let's not call them out for something they absolutely didn't do.
I think Pay replaced Wallet when you say as an app upgrade, but not everyone upgrades immediately or automatically; that may have been about decommissioning Wallet after the upgrade was available.
You better have mobile web figured out properly or you're not getting me as a customer.
No Reddit, I am not installing your fucking app. I clicked decline a dozen times in a row, get the hint.
Ever notice how you get a 404 occassionaly when going through the list of businesses? That was a scraping trap.
[1] https://www.notion.so/The-Hyperreality-of-Big-Data-ae0aebb35...
Anyway, I guess they've done a lot of testing for the popup and it's better for their business model. Maybe they can show more ads in the app. But not sure why they can't just show the same ads on the website. The weekly digest email is actually great and it would keep me coming back to Quora, but they've ruined the whole experience.
Imagine if you were in a physical store. Then, after 2 minutes of walking around, someone suddenly pulled you aside, erected a bunch of cardboard walls around you and said “sorry, if you want to keep looking, you need to sign up for a store account!”. You’d mutter some curses and walk straight out the door, obviously; exactly zero people would say “why, sure!”.
On a more personal note, they also refused to adequately protect my wife when we encountered and reported an unscrupulous vendor who threatened my wife and exposed her personal information on the site.
There is a very real need for this kind of thing but Yelp has proven time and time again that they can't be trusted to deliver it.
It's a total scam and they should be dragged into court and their internal memos and procedures turned inside out for the world to see.
So I'm sure your friends got a bunch of calls about this. But are you (or they) sure it was Yelp, though? Often it's some scammers in foreign countries like India.
Yelp has been involved in class acton lawsuits for this behavior no fewer than three times, and while they deny everything the court ruling astoundlingly claimed that this behavior isn't illegal or extortionary:
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying-cli...
This is hearsay that is quoted in the article you link to, but I would like to see proof of positive reviews being restored after purchasing advertising. This would not be difficult to document if it is happening.
Lawsuits in which Yelp has prevailed are not compelling evidence for the claims of malfeasance.
I've been working in the search engine industry for more than 15 years (as in, worked on core ranking algorithms and other infrastructure for a long time). I've heard similar reports countless times about ranking algorithms that our team controlled, and it was all just speculation.
Once again: Yelp has been around for 10+ years. By now, surely someone will have iron-clad proof that they paid to get bad reviews removed. I have not seen any.
Though if you already have confirmation bias that anyone who complains of a large company of shady behavior is a crazy nut, maybe this conversation chain is simply a waste of time. Without access to Yelp internals, it's always possible to just write it off as hearsay. Especially when, if you read my post, the courts have ruled that this behavior is not racketeering, even if it passes the duck test for extortion in my view.
The logical explanation offered in the video is that the salespeople themselves are the ones leaving the reviews, not sanctioned by Yelp higher ups. I worked a year doing web development and SEO for an agency that specialized in small local businesses, and enough of my clients had had similar experiences with the "Not Recommended" review algorithm after receiving harassing telemarketing calls from Yelp that I just assume that there's something shady going on.
I honestly just think their business model is structured poorly. Too many perverse incentives involved. I won't be sad to see them go.
You don't have to throw such claims around. If anything, they further weaken your case.
I watched the first couple of minutes of the video you posted. Even if we take that guy's word for it, you're talking about ONE salesperson. One bad actor. That's it. Which company doesn't have asshole sales people?
You are making a stronger claim: that Yelp itself is a bad actor. That, my friend, requires a much higher bar for proof.
Look, as I mentioned earlier, I used to work on building ranking algorithms for search engines (no, not Google). In the early days of the Internet (i.e, 15 years ago), there were lots of 3rd party people pulling off stunts like this salesperson.
You can call any business today, and try to get protection money (on Yelp) off of them. That doesn't make you a Yelp employee!
Basically, I want to draw your attention to the fact that the salesperson in that video did work for Yelp at the time. Doesn't that on its own distinguish the behavior that's happening at yelp with your experience with third party scammers?
Maybe the Wells Fargo scandal from a few years back can be a reference here. If a company is structured in a way where salespeople are incentivized to misbehave for their own personal interest, shouldn't that company be held accountable?
Anyway, you're right that I'm wrong to claim with certainty that Yelp is a bad actor. I don't have proof beyond dealing with 5 star reviews for clients locked behind Yelp's "Not recommended". But any company with a monetization scheme that in practice boils down to cold calling and harrassing small businesses, is a company against which I have no problem jumping on any bandwagon that comes my way.
How do you square that claim given that both current and former Yelp employees say they do no such thing?
How do you know those reviews are fake vs coincidence? I've heard a lot of anecdotes and conspiracies about this, but have never seen actual proof. No documents, recorded phone calls, court cases etc? And given how many people have worked at Yelp it's strange no one has blown the whistle yet if they engage in such practices. They would be an instant hero.
Here is the link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bu...
"What I got without spoken direct words..."
"The restaurateur says the representative didn’t blatantly tell Dloomy he could solve his problem by paying up, but he believes that was the underlying message"
It sounds like motivated reasoning and applying an existing narrative to the advertising calls.
There are plenty of salty business owners, and somewhat understandably. Yelp is far more proactive than, say, Amazon in policing reviews with its automated software. They do sometimes filter legitimate reviews, particularly when a reviewer has few other reviews on the site and is very flattering to the business. They do not want businesses to game the system by bribing customers or recruiting friends and family.
But of course, sometimes this incorrectly flags legitimate positive reviews. And when simultaneous negative reviews don't get filtered, this is understandably frustrating for businesses. And it doesn't take much imagination for a slightly paranoid owner to wonder if Yelp's pushy sales efforts have a nefarious undertone.
But this aggressive quality control is what makes Yelp ratings so much more useful than Amazon ratings. And if businesses can keep attracting positive reviews, especially from established reviewers on the platform, and perhaps more importantly, avoid negative reviews, their ratings will rise. And they will have to fight Yelp's slightly trigger-happy automated review moderation whether or not they give money to a Yelp sales rep.
Not bad, right?
Then we got 'the call', declined, and within 3 weeks, all but our single four start review was gone from the profile. I no longer work there, but last time I checked, they had zero stars. I can't wait to see yelp fail.
The Yelp app/site is basically the same it was 5 years ago. Rather than innovate they chose to:
- Opt for the shakedown/extortion method of ranking sites (those that advertised with Yelp rank higher, negative reviews can mysteriously disappear for advertisers)
- Whine to regulators about Google is stealing content from them (by, you know, serving a snippet of content that Yelp allows to be scraped).
- Harass users to install their (shitty) app.
This is just bad management/leadership to the core and such a waste opportunity. A telltale sign of this is the demonization of some nefarious third-party and blaming all your woes on them, which they've clearly done with Google. Don't think that's effective? Look at the current state of US politics.
I really have no time for these shenanigans.
Out of context, that would be a good thing. I hate it when a company changes user interface every week, just to stay in fashion.
Do you have any proof of this?
Admittedly, you have to know what you're doing. If you're in a food desert, like some parts of the US, you'll need to take those 4 and 4.5 star restaurant profiles with a grain of salt. What I would really like: the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see. This might also protect against paid spam reviews and over-picky reviewers.
They manipulate their own rating for money, and for that reason many consider these ratings - their core product - to be unreliable and misleading.
They will not be missed.
> I can't relate to the negativity I see here.
And yes, Yelp calculated that they could get away with their shady money-grabbing since they had no competition.
Very clever, but like most dishonest behaviors - quite short sighted.
As soon as a competitor emerged, Yelp was unceremoniously ditched.
Also worth mentioning: you didn't have to be aware of their past misdeeds to be affected by the resulting rating distortions, which are still affecting users to this day.
Source: I worked there, on the systems in question, and know for a fact that the things you're asserting are not true.
If there were some top-secret internal conspiracy to use the other tools on the site to do what you're claiming, you have to be especially credulous to believe that I -- or people just like me -- wouldn't have noticed it.
Unless you have some evidence to bring to the table other than "I read it on the internet", my word is worth more than your theories.
If you don't believe that what I'm telling you is true, then feel free to provide some proof.
I'm not sure how as a coder you'd be able to guarantee that's never been done, except if your code guaranteed that no review could ever be removed by a human moderator, which I'm sure is not the case.
I'm not sure how otherwise skeptical techy people imagine a conspiracy into reality with nothing to back it up. Don't you think that of the thousands of people who have worked at yelp, that one of them would have spread news about it with their peers?
The "shakedowns", floods of negative reviews, sudden filtering, etc. Every single instance is some anecdotal story online, and has never been backed up in court, by investigative journalism, a scientific study, any kind of material evidence.
The barrier to entry to create a business listing, get reviews, get a sales call from yelp, and study the change in review is really, really low -- and yet you'd think we'd have more proof to go on than comments on hackernews and reddit if yelp were as shady as is claimed.
There are third party services that are effectively shakedowns -- similar to what shady SEO people do to spam whois contacts -- they threaten you with worse rankings if you don't pay up. These things have no connection to yelp itself.
5 seconds of googling:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2012/08/16/think-yelp-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bu...
There are multiple accounts in the same results page, and even in this very page:
> Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
> After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
Etc, etc. This seems like evidence. Or are all these people lying? Why is everyone slandering poor innocent Yelp then?
People who say they've seen bigfoot aren't lying when they genuinely believe they've seen bigfoot. That doesn't mean bigfoot exists.
If Yelp actually did shake people down like that, there would very likely be concrete proof by now (recorded phone calls, documents, emails, undercover journalism, whistleblower employees). Just as there would be concrete proof of bigfoot by now.
Then there’s also the effect of people not paying attention to their ratings in an objective way and immediately after the call start attributing any event that follows to the call.
And then of course there are folks who get a sales call after their first few reviews, as their business is picking up, and as that volume picks up some more critical folks show up and organically give negative reviews.
I don’t consider a blog post about someone who’s relaying something they say they heard from their friends to be evidence. I’d believe it if they collected data both before and after the call in an objective and consistent way.
I don't need to prove a negative. You need to prove your claim.
There's no evidence of what you're arguing, anywhere, and I'm telling you that the code didn't have any ability to support it. If there were some system to allow advertisers to influence reviews, I would have known about it. Moreover, if there were some top-secret, non-code mechanism to do it, I would have seen it in the data.
I have never seen any such thing.
On top of all of that, if it were really true that you could get your business' negative reviews removed, there would be ample evidence of this. By definition, it's not something Yelp could hide.
Nobody provides evidence. They just downvote.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2012/08/16/think-yelp-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bu...
There are multiple accounts in the same results page, and even in this very page:
> Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
> After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
Etc, etc. This seems like evidence. Or are all these people lying? Why is everyone slandering poor innocent Yelp then?
I hope they go down in flames for their shady practices, and prove that being evil isn't a viable way to do business, but I'm not holding my breath.
They have eyeballs, and eyeballs pay bills, so they're not done for.
I mostly use Google Maps these days, and while I don't necessarily trust the user ratings or it's personalized score that much more, the fact that it will link you to, e.g. Eater listicles that mention a place is a super strong signal that a place is good in an area you don't know.
What your saying about knowing how to use Yelp is right on, but it leads to some dissatisfaction, because a 4 star restaurant should be a 4 star restaurant. More importantly, they manipulate ratings. They pressure businesses to pay them to fix ratings Yelp broke. They let businesses improve ratings when they shouldn't, analogous to Glassdoor and Amazon users getting ratings they don't like kicked off or hidden. There are plenty of fake and misleading reviews. And they have lots of dark patterns e.g. pushing you to their mobile app from the web, requiring you to create an account, etc. Some of these are observable by everyone, others there are many anecdotes.
They're not going away. They provide value to people, me included. But some negativity directed their way makes sense to me.
Google maps started doing this a while ago, I don't think their algo is perfect yet, but the personal match % has been more accurate than the general rating of the restaurants.
Example, if you go to a hole in the wall taco joint, you're going to get greasy tacos served on plastic or paper plates. I mean, it's not fancy, but they're also $1 each. By complaining about that on yelp you're just showing off your silliness, not providing anything useful to other potential customers.
Over time word got out and its reviews stabilized as their pizza and ingredients are top quality. But man for a while it was all just some idiots who just wanted some dominoes like pizza.
I still prefer Zagat (though it's not what it was when it was pretty much limited to foodies) where it's available. But if I'm in an area I don't know well I still will take Yelp over picking a restaurant on total whim or because it has a clever name.
The only model of crowd-sourced reviews that interests me at this point would be one that normalizes ratings against an individual's biases (so someone who gives every place 2 stars is not skewing the average) and models preferences to give personalized recommendations (since you like establishments X and Y, you might like establishment Z that other similar users have rated highly). AFAIK Yelp isn't doing any of this.
If a place has 5 reviews and a 3 star rating that doesn't mean anything to me. Maybe it's great maybe it sucks, but I'm not turned off by it. It's just basic stats. If you're trusting one good 500-word yelp-elite review on a listing with 2000 2-star reviews, frankly you're doing it wrong.
Sometimes long reviews offer good things to search for -- for example someone might talk about a patio or happy hour that isn't identified on the site or yelp listing. I've used them for that purpose a few times.
If a place has 5 reviews and a 3 star rating
And if a place has 500 1-star reviews, someone there probably pissed off a person or group with an online following that decided on trashing.
That being said I usually use whatever has the best content available
The other problem with "Best ofs" generically is that most of the restaurants are more expensive than I'd pay for except on rare occasions. In my nearest city, 95% of my experience is with mid-rangeish ethnic, etc. restaurants. I'm very rarely in a restaurant that's likely to make a Best of list.
Zagat unfortunately missed the mark on 3 restaurants. There aren't many Japanese restaurants in my town to begin with though. It isn't even a matter of price either. All 3 I'm thinking of, one is on the cheap-end, another mid-level, and another highend.
So I find this margin of error to be enormously large. It's okay if 1 of them was on that list, but all 3 is just unusual. Plus some didn't even have a listing on that site.
I have never heard of anyone actually using Zagat either, besides the plaques I see on restaurants to showcase their awards.
Vice versa too.
If I'm walking around a city and duck into a tiny Thai space that has 4 seats I am not expecting that place to compete from an "experience" stand point to some newer fusion thai spot. I go in knowing full well the food (hopefully) is top notch and that's it.
But perhaps they do the other thing that you suggest too.
How do you handle offensive reviews (like swearing, libel, personal details), do Yelp really manually intervene?
Don't they remove fake reviews, in which case a business can say the review is fake.
The same way HN uses green usernames.
I'm glad google reviews and others have taken their place.
They rely on Google reviews and Facebook reviews. Facebook has even been toxic enough with false stories pushed in attempts to defame the company for money. I haven't heard the same about Google reviews and Reddit has been strangely fair.
I just never liked Yelp. It seems like it spoiled very early on.
edit: Just told her the news. Her response: "Good. Yelp is evil."
Could you explain what you mean here?
Thankfully it didn't play out that way. The company has a decent amount of respect in this town, and the situation was well documented in advance.
I did end up helping the restaurant down the block when they got scammed by a service claiming to be Yelp, that actually took over their profile and was making them pay to make changes to it. I think a lot of supposed "Yelp scammed me" stories are actually that - third parties.
Yep. I suspect this too. It's the same thing that happens with spammy SEO services that effectively threaten to hurt your search rank unless you pay up.
How so? I've registered businesses on Google and never gotten a sales call from a Google rep.
Edit: some vs most. I can't speak for all of the departments.
Before the inevitable protests, here's how it works. AdWords is quite willing to take money from Business A's competitor Business B for the precise phrase "Business A", as well as numerous other phrases that obviously refer to Business A. As a result, searches by naive mobile users for "Business A" will instead yield on-screen directions to "Business B". Business A will only find out about a small fraction of this traffic redirection, but it will still hurt them. In order to fix it, they only need to pay more money to AdWords than their competitors. That may be legal, but it is certainly extortion.
[EDIT:] To return to the topic of Yelp, it may be that extortion works when you've got the muscle to enforce it. Google have that, but a site like Yelp where most of the traffic is coming from a search engine probably doesn't.
I'm in the US. Have been all over the place, all over both coasts, texas, and colorado.
Maybe I just like it because I never read reviews. Like YouTube, comments are poison to otherwise good content. People suck.
Eventually Apple will probably need to have its own place data if it wants to continue to compete in maps. Yelp would give them a starting point.
But Beats had that upscale demographic and positive brand image that Apple covets so dearly, whereas Yelp feels very much like a bygone brand of the 2010s IPO rush (along with Groupon and Foursquare). Not sure Apple would be interested. They can just pay for the POI data. Why buy the cow when all you need is the milk?
You suggest "they can just pay for the POI data." Which is basically what I'm suggesting.
Yelp's actual underlying asset is its POI database. Apple might want that if they decide to own rather than rent (which is a transition Google made a while back). Not at any price, but if Yelp continues to struggle the valuation might make sense.
While Foursquare wouldn’t even be for $1B. It was last valued at $300M 3 years ago and just raised money again. So at worst it’s 4x cheaper. At best, 5x or 6x cheaper. The business model probably fits better too with having an enterprise package with Apple Maps.
On top of it, my 5 star reviews keep getting filtered, even ones that have shown for months. Meanwhile two recent 1-star reviews we got with people from brand new accounts still show just fine.
GOOD RIDDANCE, hope they go BK. They deserve it.
But when you're a site raking based on activity, what're you going to do? If Yelp didn't see traffic it can hardly recommend it.
It is not that Aska NYC gives two cents about it not showing up on every Yelp search - after all they are a place that gets away with charging your credit card when you make a reservation and offers no refunds!
IMO, the best ways to find restaurants are Google reviews or OpenTable/Bookenda/Resy/etc...
Yelp ratings (at least here in NYC) are the most reliable signal of a restaurant's quality I've ever found, particularly when you look at the histogram.
If a place has significantly more 5-star ratings than 4-star, you're basically guaranteed it will be amazing.
And it has more 4-star than 5-star (assuming it's also more 4-star than 3-star), it's probably fine but there's a reason it's not getting 5 stars, and it's unlikely to be amazing.
Obviously this relies on having a large enough sample size (e.g. 30+).
Yelp is also happy to manipulate reviews contrary to their denials. It is rather funny, of course, because it seems that no one in the tech leadership of the company understands how easy it is to take a screenshot of a review.
I don't remember this being as much of an issue when Yelp launched? It seems like there are certain restaurants (advertisers? mathematically trending places?) that they're determined to shoehorn into any search result.
Also, it's frustrating how every review site I've tried constantly turns off the "open now" filter. I get that people want to plan tomorrow's lunch at 10pm, but other people just want to quickly find a decent place to take their hungry friends.
Yelp worked great.
I miss the days when their competitor, Urbanspoon, was really pushing the envelope on a great customer experience and review variety.
To me, every time there's a migration of platform for restaurant reviews, the user experience gets worse. :(
Also, they focus too much on search/ratings, so finding a place is harder when you aren't quite sure what you're in the mood for. I hope Yelp focuses more on the discovery aspect, because right now that's happening on Instagram and blogs like Eater.
The way they run their business is comical as well. In my city Yelp is basically a non-factor. Businesses that have 500 Google or OpenTable reviews will often have a dozen Yelp reviews at most, yet Yelp will constantly phone you trying to get you to sign up for their services... Usually very aggressively and during peak business hours.
The magic sauce for them might be cultural; though there’s definitely room for a better (probably nonlinear) type of reviewing system in the market given how bad quality Yelp reviews are in comparison.
1. Videos auto play in the app, stopping my music or whatever else I'm listening to. And I can't disable that feature.
2. Frequent crashes and other glitches (eg, the Recent category doesn't actually show many of the places I visited today).
3. No way to save default settings, like sort by rating. So with every search I have to manually set those preferences. Similarly, no way to save searches or even to go back to a previous search I just ran.
Given that there is really no good verification for restaurant reviews, there must be a ton of fake reviews out there. In theory, it would not be too hard to periodically crawl reviews and figure out when/if they got deleted and use that dataset to find patterns.
Case in point: let's say you're looking for a restaurant in a certain area, maybe in San Francisco? So you zoom into that area and do a search: find "x" in the map.
So what do they do? They zoom out (sometimes, far out) to include some advertisers.
Rule #1 if you have a customer-facing product: if you give the users choice, then respect that choice! Always respect the user. Always.
Yelp took far too long to go big into self-service advertising.
Also, I love the filters on there compared to Google (Google maps always seems to hide a lot of places)
Other than that, I get the same value prop else where.
Some people rate taco bell 5 stars, some 1 star. These people should not influence ratings for eachother.
Money 'abandoned' my wallet when I payed for my friend's dinner and she payed me back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXZ5htogKg (episode preview - safe for work)
https://vimeo.com/209623455 (short clip -- NSFW)
The actual reviews themselves are honestly the worst part of the whole site.
I'm yet to eat at a Yelp 4-star restaurant in NYC that I didn't think was good. Besides Foursquare as an alternative, the reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, etc. are all way too inflated.