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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I abandoned Yelp as a user pretty quick as it was just too much to filter through so many reviews by people who 1) Had some one off bad experience that is probably not representative of anything. 2) Wished that place they reviewed was like some other place that is kinda the same but ... it's twice the price so why are you comparing?

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I absolutely loathe yelp reviews. Far too many people trying to act like professional reviewers spending 500 words on setting the scene of the restaurant only to end up on 2/5 stars because of something ridiculous like bad lighting. This is all within given context, but there's been so many reviews for smaller divey type places that get people slamming it over stuff only to end up with a single line of "food wasn't bad though".

Those are the good reviews, they give details about what to expect. I have no problem with good food, bad service places.

I said it's within context though. Going into a divey 6 seat restaurant and expecting top tier service/experience is a bit weird. I have no problem with them, its' people taking pot shots & ranking down b/c it doesn't stack up to their preferred experience.

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.

It's not great but TBH I still find it to be better than nothing. You've pretty much described every review site on the Internet. "My hotel room in Manhattan was small." You don't say.

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 idea that I would take some random stranger's advice because they earned some 'Yelp Stars' or whatever by wasting a bunch of their time on the site trying to feel important is ridiculous. I stopped looking at these pretty quick after I realized what a time-sink it was that did not seem to result in me patronizing any better places than I was before. (And the fact that Yelp seems to go out of there way to prevent me from surfacing details I might actually be curious about from reviews). It seems they are much more interested in optimizing the site to encourage people to write reviews rather than make those reviews useful to those who might be reading them. Why are they creating a situation where 500 people are writing 500-word reviews that no one will ever read? When the most sophisticated aggregation of this they seem capable of doing is "4 people mentioned the cashew chicken! [What they had to say about the cashew chicken, well good luck figuring that out]."

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 700 reviews and a 4.5 star rating that's good signal that it's good, regardless of how many words are put into the 3 reviews you see on the front page.

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.

Exactly. I'm under no illusion that Yelp is a particularly useful filter to pick out the ultimate dining experience. But I travel something over 100 days a year. If for at least some of those days when I'm in unfamiliar locations, Yelp can--with a little bit of skeptical evaluation on my part--help me pick restaurants that are mostly to my tastes and on the better side of average, it's done its job. I am somewhat critical/fussy about restaurants in general so I don't mind spending a few minutes to do some research.

Same. Few things irk me more than spending money on mediocre food, especially as I've gotten better at cooking. I may not eat at the best/hottest/hippest joint in town when I'm in a new place looking things up on yelp, but I can pretty consistently eat someplace that I'm happy with.

If a place has 700 reviews and a 4.5 star rating

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.

Your choices aren't just Yelp and nothing though. There are things that are better than both, like Foursquare.

I always appreciated Fourquares more straight forward Good, OK, bad approach to reviewing.

Tripadvisor has always been best for me, in the UK, but you do have to interpret reviews carefully.

Yelp tends to be worse outside the US so I tend to agree Tripadvisor is relatively better. But in the US, I'll often look at Tripadvisor for B&Bs etc. but I tend to come back to Yelp for restaurants.

I looked up local Zagat best in "XYZ" type reviews in my citiy, all the top listings are completely off by a wide margin in multiple categories. Some popular restaurants aren't even on there.

That being said I usually use whatever has the best content available

None of them are even close to perfect. "Best" isn't necessarily all that correlated to popular though.

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.

The "Best ofs" I know of are generally concensus based though. If I asked 10 people in my area who are foodies, they would all generally agree with the results of what the best "Japanese restaurants" are in town. Having been to Japan myself (and speak conversational Japanese), I know what good quality Japanese food tastes like. I also know which local restaurants make their own noodles in-house VS those that don't, b/c I know most of the owners.

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.

Restaurant reviews are always a moving target because of the nature of the business. So many of them go broke and disappear over the years that some restaurant with legacy 4.5 star reviews might not be anywhere near as good as a new trendy one that just opened up that has no reviews.

Vice versa too.

I worked with an IOS guy from Argentina, before software, he was paid to write reviews for companies in the states.There's some plausible deniability, he worked for a contracting company that did this work. Since then, I stopped using Yelp.

I think the trick is to not focus on how many stars a place has, but the number of reviews it has, especially when visiting a new place.

The number of people who clearly had no idea what they were signing up for was always amusing to me.

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.

I had a great neopolitan style pizza place open in my neighborhood. It was inundated by bad reviews by people who were upset that it was "just floppy thin crust pizza" and so forth.

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.

Seems a lot of reviews are hidden. Suspect they hide good reviews unless the owner pays to be an advertiser.

They hide reviews of newly active users without histories. The idea (at least) is to prevent fraud of owners asking their friends to make yelp accounts.

The same way HN uses green usernames.

I understood they do NOT hide reviews unless you pay; so if you get bad reviews you can sign up and hide them.

But perhaps they do the other thing that you suggest too.

They don't do either of these things. There are some anecdotes online but no evidence of this happening.

Was that always true? I had a call from Yelp at work where one of the selling points was controlling your profile, in which they mentioned "removing spam" and "offensive reviews" (they might have said "fake"). I took that euphemistically when combined with rumours I'd heard. But that was some years ago (maybe 5+, in UK); and could have been overselling or phishing by a third party I suppose.

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.

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