Lone Yelp review dogs business owner | Hacker News Reader

Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

chicagotribune.com

222 pointsblahedo144 comments

This raises several important issues.

The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes.

This has several important implications.

- It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume; and

- Again I'll say something I've said here repeatedly: the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything.

Secondly, businesses like Yelp risk going down the comScore route. 10 years ago comScore was the source for visitor numbers, which drove advertising revenue. If you paid you got accurate numbers. If you didn't, comScore "guessed", and for some reason those numbers always seemed low, so much so that lots complained.

The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted.

It's why I think companies like Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) should stay out the content business. We're great at connecting people to things they want. If we're one of those things they want then we have at least the potential for the appearance (if not the actuality) of impropriety, at the very least.

I just don't see local reviews and social search going, well, anywhere, certainly anytime soon.

What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and +1 buttons. There's isn't a -1 or notlike option.

I suspect Yelp is extremely venerable and could be successfully sued from several angles. However, the court system tends to protect such companies on free speech grounds etc. So, their downfall will probably come from leaked internal operations rather than any external source.

A beautiful typo. You mean "vulnerable" for "venerable" right? Is that because you think they really are doing what the article implies? Is there evidence more substantial than that offered by the Tribune? The article for me is just shoddy journalism. Can it be that hard to really test the hypothesis that businesses that turn down the ad salesperson get screwed by Yelp? I don't want to defend Yelp since I don't like the site, but I think its pretty scummy of the Tribune also to willingly promulgate, at least by rhetorical implication, the idea that Justin G is some kind of shill for non-Brader dog trainers.

(Very much tangential at this point, so I'll put my theory that Justin G, far from being a shill, is actually a superhero in parentheses. Consider: He's very secretive. He reviews businesses without leaving behind a trace of his true identity. He doesn't respond to queries from the Tribune. And look at his profile: He wears a cape. A cape! Also, his reviews are annoyingly sincere. And as for his name, clearly Justin G is justing the world one review at a time. Yes, verbing weirds language, but if you can justly right the world, why not rightly just it too?)

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(linguistics)#Humor

I've heard talk of dodgy behaviour from Yelp before. See eg. this article: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e... (via here: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/)

This isn't the first extortion attempt we've read about over the past few years, and Yelp's excuse is always their so called impartial "algorithm". Google, for their part, extorts Yelp in much the same way, as they used to do with Experts-exchange, until that racket became too obvious. If Yelp reviews were not so useless they'd probably have been sued for racketeering by now. That said I bet the first Federal RICO case they go up against will put them out of business.

As a consumer i'd prefer not getting any likes to getting tons of notlikes on my boring fb status updates...

Besides, an issue with such systems being used to determine merit is this... Which is worse, having a bunch of people who consume the content you created and not give a ditt or people connecting with it and disagreeing and marking a downvote

"It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume"

I've been a member of Angie's List for over 2 years now. It's not only saved me countless amounts of money over choosing nationally-advertised service companies for stuff like plumbing and HVAC work, but it's saved me tons of aggravation filtering out the honest, hard-working businesses from the fly-by-night charlatans who pile on services and "annual maintenance contracts" that are just code for finding yet another problem next year.

How do they get "local" reviews? Simple. If you pay for it, you'll review to keep the cycle of reviews going. If you're invested $30-60/yr. to subscribe, you feel like you have a vested interest in keeping both the review site and the service provider alive. I liken it to the SomethingAwful forums: the ones who subscribe are also the most frequent posters.

But, Angie's List also uses their own tactics to keep reviews flowing and fresh. They will email reminders to review service providers you've recently browsed if you decided to use them. They'll even call you to record a review over the phone and then they'll transcribe it.

It's why they've been blowing everyone else out of the water in "local" search since the 90s.

I love the philosophy and have been keeping an eye on Angie's List for a long time but unfortunately it still isn't available in my area, although it looks like they are starting to think about Canada (province is mentioned here and there on their site).

>>It's why I think companies like Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) should stay out the content business.

Isn't AdSense content business?

Not really. And even if so, doesn't change the meaning or validity of the comment.

I think social search has value if we define it differently. In other words, I agree with your assessment. The thing that is social, is search, and has value is something more implicit. It observes the behaviors and decisions of other people, perhaps your friends but perhaps not, and infers recommendations from those. Amazon and netflix already do this in their domains to great success. It will become more prevalent. This is not what most people think of when they say "social search," and this is not the thing that you are (rightly) deriding. But I would imagine that in a decade, this is what will eventually be described with the term "social search."

"The problem is that comScore (and now Yelp) have an economic incentive to get people to advertise such that they are not impartial and site therefore cannot be trusted."

That's a key part of it. They do two things: keep track of a "fair score," and sell to some of the businesses being scored. It's an inherent conflict of interest. And they have not taken any steps to mitigate it.

Google faces the same problem, but the AdWords auction mechanism diffuses the COI so the temptation to extortion is mitigated.

As some have pointed out farther down, newspapers and magazines have the same problem. Serious newspapers have a wall between editorial and advertising to mitigate the COI.

I question the value of social search in general. It doesn't matter what your friends like. What matters is what others with similar tastes like. The only good thing about social search is the context informed by the relationships.

Following you 100% on this vision.

There's been a lot of hype around social recommendation lately; it was fresh and new because only [somewhat] lately has 'Social' itself been made possible through Facebook.

But as I see things, we don't make friends because they have our tastes or because they can correctly recommend us stuff we'd like; we simply feel really good with friends, no matter what they like. Only the people who have our tastes can help us finding what we should like, or at least be able to do it better than most of our friends.

Basing recommendation solely on our social circle's tastes is like thinking our friends are the ones with the closest tastes to ours. And I think that's wrong.

Unless I got it wrong, Rex.ly for example, is taking a much better approach by letting you select specific friends to influence your recommendations.

> What matters is what others with similar tastes like.

Yes. Exactly. And it depends. Some friends have very different tastes than I - and sometimes that's exactly why they are my friends (who wants homogenous friends?).

For some items, I want to know what others with similar tastes like - like restaurants, for instance. A friend of mine loves fried food; me, not so much. But a stranger who likes healthy food may know of an unpopular restaurant none of my friends know of. That is exactly the kind of restaurant I would want surfaced in a good social search for restaurants.

For news articles, I would want the opposite. I don't necessarily want people with similar tastes to recommend articles to me. I'd rather read conflicting views across the gamut of the argument, so I can make my own (hopefully) informed decision. Again, friends aren't as good a source of such articles as strangers would be.

And to make it more complicated, that's just my preference. Someone else might prefer people with similar tastes instead.

I definitely agree that the context informed by the relationships is the key to social search - sometimes it's someone similar to you, other times, it's not.

"The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes"

Is there any data to support this point. Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.

Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.

It may lead to a higher number of snitty reviews, as in "I gave this restaurant 1 star because I went there for my friends birthday and she was depressed at getting oder." Or, "This book gets 1 star because UPS delivered it while I was not home and they left it in the rain."

"the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything."

I completely agree. The other huge problem with social search is I don't have 100% overlap with all of my friends. If I like Alice's taste in music, and Bob's taste in food, searching among Alice's taste in food and Bob's taste in music is a complete loss for me. Instead, I want "Netflix search": "people similar to you that rated Foo 4 stars also rated Bar 4 stars.

Wait until someone links up all our friends' and coworkers' credit card purchases, netflix views, google searches, downloads, travel history, etc- or even just a few pieces of that- then you can start to come up with a recommendation engine (AKA social search) that doesn't require people to actively create content for.

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months.

It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate.

The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account.

Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate.

The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added.

Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone.

It's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it. I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads.

Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is flaky at best, and a scam at worst. "freedom of speech" has not the same meaning when you are at Yelp.

I don't think so, people running businesses hate seeing negative reviews about themselves. No matter what Yelp did, nothing is going to change that fact, and nothing will put it right in the minds of those being criticized.

There are significantly more stories of businesses having a great experience with Yelp than a bad one. But it's not exactly a great story for the Chicago Tribune to highlight all of those businesses.

What does it say to you that a judge threw the case out?

Really? I've only ever heard bad things. Can you provide examples?

It's not hard at all to believe that businesses would complain about a review site that is working perfectly. Would you be willing o disclose your parents' business so hat we can analyze the hidden reviews?

Then how do you explain this?

http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...

I am not sure what you mean.

Why would filtered reviews distribution match up to the unfiltered reviews?

Typically a "fake" review is either going to be someone who is raving about a business to try to boost the rating or someone who for some reason wants to bad mouth the business (e.g. a competitor) so it makes sense that 1 and 5 star ratings are the most filtered.

Read it again. The distribution of filtered reviews doesn't match between average and the one for Yelp itself. Clearly doctored.

The evidence provided does not support your conclusion. For starters, 19 reviews are not nearly enough to make any comparisons.

Earlier this summer, a Yelp salesman called Brader's house to ask if he wanted to advertise on the Yelp site.

Yelp will never make it as a public company, which means that it should technically fizzle and die sooner rather than later. What they do isn't illegal, but it should be; its revenue model is unethical, sleazy, blackmailing, extortion.

Making it as a public company is not mutually exclusive from being sleazy.

Those are some pretty bold accusations based on rather thin evidence. Are you suggesting that such a service is incapable of running above-board? Is there anything Yelp could do to prove to you that it is operating in an ethical and reasonable manner?

Yelp seems to have had a lot of bad press for this kind of thing and has had at least one class action suit, alleging extortion, levelled against it:

http://yelpscam.com/negative-yelp-press.html

A lawsuit filed against them is not proof of anything. That same suit was thrown out.

That's an awful lot of negative press. Seems quite possible there's something to it (unless there's some sort of conspiracy against Yelp).

Yelp's filtering algorithm is terrible. Purely anecdotal, but: I've tried writing reviews on Yelp several times. When I first started reviewing and my reviews were getting filtered out, I'd think "OK, maybe I just need to continue reviewing and eventually Yelp will realize I'm not a faker". After about 20 reviews (spread over a couple weeks, most of which still remain flagged), I got pissed and gave up.

How does Amazon solve this problem? AFAICT, Amazon doesn't filter out any reviews, and I've never noticed fake reviews being a problem. Are people simply less inclined to give fake-glowing or fake-terrible reviews on Amazon? (Makes somewhat sense to me, since Amazon is less "personal".)

Amazon (and app stores, for that matter) have a huge advantage in that they can verify that the reviewer is at least a customer. Amazon differentiates these reviewers visually in the reviews. Yelp cannot take this verification step.

The problem Yelp has is that they don't allow unfiltered reviews to be contested. So even if Brader or his customers wanted to contact Yelp and say "Hey, our reviews aren't spam or for gaming the system" and explain what happened, there's no easy/official way to do it.

The one and only time I wrote a review on Yelp, I gave a restaurant a one star rating because the customer service was truly terrible and I left with a horrible taste in my mouth (figuratively). The review wasn't riddled with spelling/grammatical errors and it extremely close to the word limit Yelp has in place. Anyone reading it could tell it wasn't a fake review. Heck, in the few days the review was up, it got voted up to most useful review. But I got hit by the filter anyways. I suspect the algorithm really is flawed and not being manipulated like some people claim, but maybe I'm an optimist.

You're probably right. Seems mostly a case of.. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Mix in a bit of "lazy" and you've got yourself a situation that sucks for the small people unable to fix the big system.

From personal experience Yelp is a company I do not respect or trust in anything.

Yelp absolutely don't care about small business and how their filtering system works. My wife is running a small business and she has been facing exactly the problems described in the article. Real customers posting real reviews but quickly disappearing in the filtered reviews for unknown reasons, some of her customers have been on Yelp for a while but still their reviews are filtered, while some competitors (we guess) post a negative review with what is most likely a fake account stayed, and are never filtered out.

Like in the article, my wife was contacted by Yelp to advertise, and she declined... Soon after some of the positive reviews vanished!

Yelp until a year or so ago didn't even let business owner reply to a negative review, so the power was in the hand of the reviewer. What is worst is that even with that in place, even if a fake review is posted and advertising for a competitive business which is against their TOS, Yelp simply do not care of removing such review. Another area wher Yelp is doing a really poor job: it is still possible to review a closed business or a business that change name BUT the business owner can't reply to any such post. So the communication is borked and Yelp does't care to fix that. They do mention "freedom of speech" which my wife and I do get, but then how come someone can post a review on a close business, but the previous business owner can't reply to it?? If people are able to review but owner can't reply, it means that their back end system has some logic to handle that, but the code for the owner to reply has most likely been disabled ! Why? That's not really how freedom of speech work!

Yelp is NOT at all for promoting small business, they are in the business of selling ads and having the most page views. Trying to be a fair and honest business is not at all on their business plan.

From what I heard from other small business owner here in the Bay Area, they have experienced mostly the same.

Yelp is what I consider a SCAM and as a software engineer I will never consider a job in this unprofessional company. Sooner or later I think the truth will be shown on how Yelp manipulate their system for their own benefits.

Finally to conclude this rant, my wife business is still going on even with some negative reviews because we made sure that she was not dependent on Yelp for getting customers. She had many happy returning customers for the past 3 years, even if their positive reviews disappeared.

Yelp are in a hard place, they show negative reviews about peoples businesses. People who work there, or own the business absolutely hate this, because it could cost them there business. Nobody likes having their work threatened.

And most people who own businesses think they are doing a good job, and don't like criticism. They take it very personally, and blame Yelp rather than the reviewer.

It looks like either you have never been interacting with a business owner you know and trust, or you are a Yelp employee. Believe me, my wife can handle negative review when they are truthful but when you see a negative reviews that is clearly advocating for a competitors and Yelp doesn't do a thing to remove it, you have to wonder what are they up to. Additionally even without getting all the information about a review that Yelp is getting (IP address, frequency of visits, etc), we saw a few times similar negative review being posted on the same day with similar wordings for 2 newly created accounts. Interesting enough the same day one real customer (with many Yelp reviews) posted a 4 stars reviews... Guess what? Yelp 'algorithm' filtered out the 4 stars reviews and left the 2 one star reviews... Sorry but as an engineer with over 15 years of experience it sounds fishy to me.

Since my wife started her business, she has met various other business owners with similar experience...

Hard to believe that their filtering system is not directed toward the good of Yelp business plan for selling ads.

Someone who sees anyone arguing Yelp's side as an employee sounds a little paranoid. I am inclined not to believe you, and surprised you would put forward that argument. Of course your are expected to think the best about your wife, and how she handles business.

You may even be correct, but you are too biased in this issue to offer an honest and objective opinion, surely you see that?

Now I am not saying Yelp do not do some dodgy filtering, but it would be incredibly stupid of them if they did. I have seen many arguments before, but no actual proof. And this article from the WSJ, after further investigation, indicated that Yelp are not doing anything dodgy. The negative reviews seem to be honest, from a decent reviewer, not a fellow dog trainer.

The article could have revealed that of the 18 "hidden" reviews, 14 were the only review by the Yelper and 11 were in a one week period. These are two of the main criteria for Yelp's filtering.

I'm surprised people believe that Yelp would be so clumsy and unethical to simply penalize non-advertisers.

I'm surprised people think they wouldn't. They have the perfect hideout. Whatever the case they can always blame it on the "algorithm," and short of auditing their source code, nobody can really prove them otherwise.

Not that perfect of a hideout. I'd love to see someone collect data for cases where they think Yelp is intentionally manipulating reviews and see how many cases aren't easily explained by good filtering criteria.

[Full-disclosure: I'm friends with a good number of Yelp engineers who I expect would leave rather than take part in these such things, but I don't know any more about their codebase than any other non-Yelper.]

There is certainly a ton of press around this coming from several reputable media outlets for months. Google for 'yelp extortion'. So you shouldn't be surprised. This is a real problem for them. At minimum, here is a documented case of legitimate reviews that simply aren't shown. They are basically saying 'The computer did that, so fuck off' and end up coming off like a bully, which by all measured terms they are.

This meme hit pretty big a year or two ago, a bunch of lawsuits were filed and nothing came of any of them. Yelp is usually able to demonstrate in each case that what it claims is happening is accurate (advertisers are buying a specific bill of goods, review flagging is systematic, etc.).

Its SEO'ers....

A competitor of the dog training business hires an SEO Search Engine Optimiser to increase his business. To do that they post negative reviews of all the competitors. They post fake positive reviews of their client.

I have tracked this down before. The positive reviews all looked suspiciously similar and over-glowing. I have seen the same review, the same day, by the same guy, in multiple nearby neighborhoods.

This also can happen when an SEO marketer calls and you turn him down. He then spites your site and calls back again later to see if your more agreeable....

In case you want to dig in deeper, Frank Brader's dog business on Yelp now has 4 stars from 5 reviews:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

Justin G, the negative reviewer, was a Yelp Elite member from 2006-2008:

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

I'd get rid of the punitive filtering too if negative press came out.

I wonder if "Elite" indicates paid? Yelp does pay, or has paid in the past, some reviewers.

No need to speculate about "elite": http://www.yelp.com/elite

You can argue that the benefits of being "elite" equate to compensation but that's a pretty slippery slope and I'm not sure entirely useful.

They don't get paid. I've been Elite for about 3 years now. But they do get invited to Elite only parties which they get to sample free food and drinks.

I believe Yelp does pay reviewers for "seeding" a city when they launch in a new area in order for there to be content when they open in the city.

A friend of mine committed himself to get Elite status one year. He did it too, by writing hundreds of reviews. Though he tried making most of them pretty funny, he eventually switched to a strategy that emphasized quantity over quality, because he didn't feel he was getting there with just high-quality reviews. Surprisingly, this seemed to work, though perhaps his multitude of reviews were genuinely useful enough.

He didn't get paid for any of this either. It was just for the parties, grand openings, and extra-special treatment at restaurants.

I don't have any way of verifying these accounts, but I see a couple of stories about Yelp paying (non-Elite) reviewers to write reviews:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives...

There's also a thread on Yelp about a supposed popular paid reviewer too:

http://www.yelp.com/topic/redding-paid-reviewers-suck

I recall reading somewhere that when Yelp started, they seeded their database with paid reviews as well, to surmount that chicken-and-egg problem of new social networks & review services. I wouldn't consider that a negative mark against them though.

The 4 new reviews appear to have been generated by the article and I suspect 2 or 3 of them will eventually be hidden. And rightfully so since they are content-free and by new reviewers.

The obvious thing to do for the guy is to post a note explaining the situation on his website and link to Chicago Tribune's article. That should alleviate most if not all concerns of those who read that Yelp review.

(edit) And display the note only to those coming from Yelp.

I would expect that the note is then buried or removed under Yelp's labyrinthine terms of service.

Wrong. The note goes right in the same box as the review.

Wrong too. The note goes on guy's website, not on Yelp's. "We noticed you came here from Yelp. Yadda-yadda..."

Wrong.

"Where your Public Comment will appear Your comment will appear directly following the review that you've commented on."

https://biz.yelp.com/support/responding_to_reviews

"Wrong?"

GP's comment said "The obvious thing to do for the guy is to post a note ... on his website" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959702 - that's the context.

Wrong. I was replying to this comment: "I would expect that the note is then buried or removed under Yelp's labyrinthine terms of service."

I unfortunately cannot downvote your reply.

Anyone find it weird that Yelp makes you pass a reCaptcha when trying to look at filtered reviews? Clearly you can look at unfiltered reviews without this. It's almost like Yelp is yelling "Don't look at these reviews....please!"

Customer reviews and ratings can be one hell of a mess, not just for businesses but also for customers.

As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, which leave you more confused than when you started.

I generally read reviews to answer simple questions which the product listing does not answer. I try to find out if there are any common problems with a product.

A good FAQ and a list of the most common problems may be a better solution than pages of reviews.

Reviews can be pretty useful. If my mom needs a simple modem/wifi/router in her house, I'll just buy her whatever one has the most reviews on Amazon.

If you choose a product with a rating of more than 4 stars averaged over a lot of customer reviews, it's pretty decent data to go by. For routers, there are a handful of good brand names you can safely pick from. Even so, you admit you don't actually read the reviews, just go by the total number.

It's harder when choosing a product like a washing machine which has a lot of options between 3-4 stars in any given price range and no clear winner.

Given Yelp's size, why doesn't it employ some collaborative filtering options? In general I don't care about everyone's reviews (especially of restaurants). But it would be interesting to know -- for people who like White Castle, McDonald's, and Denny's, but not Applebees -- what would they recommend. This is not the type of thing you could typically get by reading reviews by themselves (and maybe those people wouldn't do Yelp reviews in any case). But standalone reviews of things where taste is such a large component I find almost worthless. With that said dog training is probably something where taste plays a much smaller role.

There's a new mobile app called Ness (http://www.likeness.com) that's trying to do this. I happen to agree with you, so I really hope Ness can pull this off. I'd really like a recommendation service that knows my personal preferences.

I'm on it, I'm on it....(http://www.placeling.com).

They should really reply to the negative review and point to the other positive reviews. Whether genuine or fake, you will always have unhappy customers, but you have to deal graciously even with the nastiest of them.

It's easy to come down against Yelp, but small businesses have been trying to "game" Yelp in unsophisticated ways for some time.

We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be submitted by friends. They get angry at Yelp for allowing bad reviews to show up and think they can fix it with reviews written in all-caps with text like "Bob and Jane ARE THE NICEST, WARMEST, MOST AMAZING PEOPLE I KNOW and the person who wrote the review above DOESN"T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT." We always advise them not to use these tactics but to instead put a sign up asking their customers to leave reviews on Yelp (since all reviews on the site trend to 4.3, they're probably improving their position with every new review).

To recap:

- So a business has a small amount of reviews online, one negative from someone who has left more than 400 reviews.

- The business asks their loyal customers to leave positive reviews all at the same time.

- Yelp sees abnormal traffic and abnormal acceleration of overly-positive reviews from brand new users (OMG. Best Dog Trainer EVER!! A+++++ Would recommend).

- Yelp's algorithm flags this activity as abnormal since it looks similar to spam/paid/fake reviews and won't alter their algorithm to accommodate an attempt to game their system.

The reality is small businesses do this kind of "gaming" all the time and sometimes it's benign, sometimes it's malicious or fake. I once worked with a client who had left dozens of reviews about themselves and complained that Yelp always took them down which "wasn't fair". Yelp sees way more attempts at gaming reviews than you'd realize and I imagine they've gotten pretty good at it. Like Google's algorithms, Yelp's algorithms may occasionally flag real reviews. Both have an incentive to improve.

The other thing is that if I'm a sales agent at Yelp (responsible for bringing in $8k in revenue this month), I'm going to call on customers who have bad reviews (and thus show up lower in searches) first. This is not because I'm trying to scam anyone. It's because the folks at the bottom are usually the most eager to pay to show up at the top. The guys who already sit in the top 5 spots of an organic search have trouble justifying the expense. If I call on someone who is on the first page of a Yelp search, their first thought isn't going to be "this guy's trying to scam us". Likewise, the companies that buy Google ads aren't the ones who show up first in an organic search either (unless they demonstrate that the ROI justifies it. SMBs aren't typically as sophisticated).

This isn't extortion, it's not a scam, and it's not wrong. It may appear obtuse from the outside, but nothing would harm Yelp more than for these allegations to be true. It would be downright irresponsible of Yelp to try to do things this way from a shareholders' perspective.

TL;DR: SMBs try to game Yelp all the time. Yelp's built algorithms to look for this kind of behavior. This business hit a lot of triggers.

Agreed. If there was one terrible review written a year or two ago by someone with a reviewing history, and then suddenly twenty gushing all caps reviews filled with superlatives and exclamations of personal affection by reviewers with no other review history, all posted within the same week, I'd be upset if yelp didn't filter them out.

If some business tells all of their best customers to post a review on Yelp, a site they had never used before, then they actually are straw reviews and worth nothing - and this business owner admits that. Case closed. Filter working perfectly.

This is not to say that the one bad review characterizes this man's business in any way. He probably just doesn't have a tech-savvy, hip clientele, and the first yelper he ran into may have been a spoiled curmudgeon. What offsets the damage is that since he isn't drawing from that hip clientele, the review is likely not driving away any significant business.

The best response would probably be to put a Yelp sign in some prominent space, which might trigger someone who is familiar with their business to add a few more reviews. If he gives good service, the preponderance will be good. Much better idea than calling for a favor from your affectionate regulars.

There is no right to a good reputation.

But the implication in the article is that the negative review is a fake review put up by a competing dog trainer...

That implication is based on the fact that he has reviewed seven dog trainers, given two of them one star reviews, one of them a five star review, and the other four reviews weren't worth mentioning in the article for some reason.

Is it at all unlikely that this guy took a dog to two trainers, didn't like them, then went to a third that he thought was great? Or does it have to be a conspiracy?

-----

edit:

and from the article, the business owner's opinion: "The whole thing is odd," Frank Brader said. "It certainly seems to me that he's been to so many other dog trainers that nothing you can do is going to satisfy this person."

-----

another edit:

Here's the profile in question:

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

Does anything even look vaguely suspicious about it? His average rating is four stars, and contrary to the article, he went to four dog trainers in 2010, and gave two of them five star ratings, and two of them one star ratings.

http://www.yelp.com/user_details_reviews_self?userid=z25c9Ty...

-----

and another:

Now the review is being pushed out by wonderful, helpful reviews like this:

"Just read the Chicago tribune article and it's just terrible! Yelp should pull this review!"

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

"The Chicago Tribune article could go evan a lot further to expose Yelp for the extortionist business model they employ. I and thousands of hard working small business folks around the country who deliver exceptional quality and service every day to our customers are being victimized by this extortionist buiness model."

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

and

"Score one for the small business owner not happy with Yelp's horrible filter algorithm. Yelp is a horrible business and if they don't fix things fast they will simply disappear (we can only hope) its amazing how there filter has managed to alienate all of their users (businesses and reviewers). Great article in the tribune, shine more light on Yelp's craptastic system. By the way we are animal lovers too!"

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

All five stars.

All true, but note that the "other 18" in this case are not all posted in the same week, with all caps etc. Several are in the same week, but others are spread over multiple years and are not overly gushy, all-caps-y, or anything else (although it's possible they were one-time posters). Reading through the filtered posts, my thought was that if these were the work of someone gaming the system, that person is A LOT more subtle and meta than one would normally expect. More likely is that the majority of them are totally legit.

TL;DR: You're wrong. And you sound like someone from Yelp trying to "game the system" and write positive reviews about yourself. Maybe PG's algorithms should censor you without any evidence?

--------------

My parents had the exact same experience as in the article.

- A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from customers who were upset we had to send them letters after they didn't pay their bills.

- We encouraged people to review the business on Yelp. Despite numerous people (including a couple Yelp Elites) writing positive real reviews, interestingly, none of the reviews showed up on Yelp.

- Customers told us their reviews had not shown up, and when we called Yelp to find out why, a few reps either claimed there was no way to put the reviews back or they denied their existence. The one thing they did have in common was they promised things would be "fixed" if we advertised with them. I'm pretty sure that's closer to extortion than smart business.

- Last week, my dad finally caved and placed some ads on Yelp.

- Within an hour, there were suddenly dozens of additional reviews on there for the business, and the rating had shot up from 2 stars to 4.5 stars.

So let me ask you, if Yelp really thought those hidden reviews were trying to game the system, why were those reviews placed back when we agreed to spend some ad money? Yelp can't argue that their reviews are unbiased when stuff like this happens.

That doesn't surprise me. Depending on the business, Yelp is powerful and you may have to play by their rule. See my previous post earlier, at least my wife small business is not too dependent on Yelp because customers are signing for classes spread over 10 to 12 weeks.

But it's terrible to see the effect of purchasing Yelp ads change Yelp system so much!

Hi akashs,

I have no affiliation with Yelp. Click on my username anytime if you want to read who I work with and some background. It's right out in the open. However, I had to look at your posts to learn that your new startup is in the local review/recommendation space which is something you should actually disclose when bashing a competitor.

If what you're saying about Yelp's ad reps and software is truthful, then you should be spreading your father's story far and wide (call your local newspaper, they'd love the story), and you should feel comfortable recommending that your father cease to do business with them (why did he?).

Best of luck in your new venture.

I didn't think you worked at Yelp, but you were defending them just like my parents' customers were defending them. And as you point out, it's wrong of me to accuse you of gaming the system without any evidence that you work for them. Doesn't feel that great, does it? You actually illustrated my point quite nicely.

Also, we're not really competing with Yelp at all, so I think it's all fair game. In fact, we're integrating with Yelp's API, since we do recognize that despite how screwed up I may think their business is, people still trust them.

And my father did it because the few hundred dollars he spent is paid back if it prevents a couple customers from leaving, or even if he doesn't have to spend another hour on the phone with them. Doesn't mean what they did is fair, though.

sounds as bad as the BBB.

The question is: Why doesn't Yelp have a flag for someone whom is posting a significant number of negative replies and one positive reply for the same business category?

Would make me question whether or not the owner of the business receiving a positive reply is trying to game Yelp's system.

I don't really like to admit it, but anyone who thinks it's just the "poor old algorithm" doing what it thinks is fair is misinformed.

Part of my core day job work involves identifying real vs not real people and also uses the same technology to drive everything - lucene. An algorithm that refuses to attempt identification beyond what data yelp itself stores is clearly in denial of the "mountain" of data available on people in the form of public web apis on the internet. I could write an "algorithm"/analyzer that does a better job than what yelp is currently doing in a day.

At the end of the day the biggest loser in all of this is probably yelp's users. Inaccurate reviews means you're getting inaccurate results on finding places local to you...which means the tool isn't nearly as useful to you as an end consumer. They might want to just sit down and find another way to get the same sales figures without sacrificing the quality of their product. Otherwise all it will take is someone else to come along and give people the right product to put them out of business. These stories that keep appearing on the internet about Yelp are increasingly becoming harder to ignore for everyone, which is sad for all the hard working engineers at Yelp who's only desire is to deliver a kick ass product. Lame

Hi spaznode, I will be really curious to hear more about your approach for doing a better filtering. Feel free to contact me (contact info/web site on my profile).

Not sure what you mean..rtfm

So technically if something like that is part of the algorithm ...

            if (customer.RefusedToAdvertise) { foreach review in Reviews ( if(review.Score > 1) { reivew.visible = false; } ) }

Yelp can then say that "employees can do nothing, everything is done by the computer" and that would technically be true. And nothing can be done because they can not be forced to reveal the actual algorithm and any case will be thrown out of court?

I use a great car rental service at LAX. I've tried to put a glowing review on their Yelp page to help them get business to no available. It doesn't even show up. I'm guessing this is because they choose not to advertise with yelp either?

I just wrote another review right now to test this out again, and my account shows I have written two with them. Why is Yelp not displaying these on their business page, and their star rating is unchanged?

Because Yelp is a scam business which extorts. I'm more surprised to see people defending Yelp on this site.

Maybe yelp paid a firm to generate positive reviews of yelp?

or maybe the opposite. maybe yelp's competitors paid to have negative reviews. hah :)

This also goes to show that a business owner can not afford to be Internet-illiterate.

I would hope that Yelp doesn't actually operate in the manner in which its detractors accuse it of (as it would seem to be pretty cut-and-dry extortion).

I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site.

Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews might as well be random. If the reviews for places that I already like are this different from my own experiences, how useful can they be for places I'm thinking about going to?

It would be like if I read movie reviews from a reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse, is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their reviews useful.

  It would be like if I read movie reviews from a
  reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse,
  is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their
  reviews useful.

You could read the reviews, and then only go to movies that reviewer hates. Not a guarantee, but it does decrease the sample size. Unless the reviewer hates all movies.

Yeah, movie reviews might not have been the best analogy. My general take on movie reviews is that I only use them to discover movies that I might have otherwise missed (i.e.: a bad review will never dissuade me from seeing a movie, but a good review of a movie I hadn't planned on seeing might make me see it).

And to be fair to Yelp, I've only ever really looked up Restaurant reviews, which seem to be the category of reviews that are the least useful. I don't think anything in a Yelp restaurant review short of "Every time I go here, they drag me to the back room and harvest my organs", would make me take notice one way or the other.

For those that haven't seen it, this is exactly how the Better Business Bureau (BBB) operates as well, here is a 20/20 investigation look at it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw

Yep, Yelp is still a total scam despite their claims of reform everytime they get publicity about their criminal behavior.

For those who ask "What crimes?", among their crimes are extortion and fraud. Deleting genuine positive reviews if you don't pay them, and deleting negative reviews if you do is simply not legitimate: there is no defense for it; the only explanation possible is that it is an extortion racket. The fraud is that they misrepresent themselves to the public as an impartial review site.

It's obscene that they are still in business and just shows you what a lousy job most state attorney generals are doing.

A completely separate issue is the review. The article says that he gave several 1 star reviews to dog trainers, but only one 5 star review on 11/9/2010 to a dog trainer, "Perfect Manners Dog Training" in Naperville. This suggests that he may be an employee or friend of the owner of that business. However, comprehensively searching his 463 reviews reveals that he also has a 5 star review on 11/9/2010 for "Thunder's Pack Canine Training" in La Grange Park and there are only two 1 star dog trainer reviews in total, the other being for "Wetnose For Dogs" in Forest Park on 9/11/2010. So either the reporter was inaccurate, or some reviews of Justin G's have been changed. Hard to say at this point. Given the huge number of reviews by this Justin G., many extremely detailed, he is probably legit.

Yelp covers things up. Here's the bad review in question:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

Notice that there are now several good reviews shown. However you can verify in Google's cache of Yelp that there was a single 1 star review on Aug 26, 2011 23:28:48 GMT, last week, a total rating of 1 star, and no other reviews shown. Since then, this article has come out (on September 4 2011) and Yelp has just now changed the site, with the date of all the good reviews being 9/4/2011, obviously when they approved them and not when they were originally posted, which was obviously before the article came out. Time and time again, when bad publicity hits from Yelp's criminal fraud, they patch things in a single spot to cover up their fraudulent activity.

You make serious allegations not supported by facts.

#3 The new reviews were obviously written in response to the article. Three of them actually reference it!

Plenty of facts there that's why I gave specifics.

I'm curious, how well do you know Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman? Do you guys meet for coffee, or are you guys just casual acquaintances from your visits to the Yelp offices?

Well enough. I presume you will consider me biased but rest assured I have no problem criticizing Yelp when warranted. But much of the criticism in the article and here is pretty weak.

Check this restaurant out. Some of its highly-rated reviews are filtered.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/tsingtao-taste-sunnyvale

According to them, Yelp called them if they want to advertise and then they will unfilter those reviews.

The filtered reviews appear to be "drive bys". I would be surprised if that hearsay is correct.

Hidden reviews were written by users with only 1-2 reviews.

When you search for this business's name, you see the 1 star review right there on Google.com along with "Don't be fooled by a nice site ...". But when you click through there's 7 reviews with a total of 4.5 stars.

Yelp must have caught on to this breaking story?

How can a computer evaluate the 'realness' of a review? The idea of Yelp, crowdsourced business reviews, is great, but do we really prefer trusting super active web content contributors, seeking cyberspace attention, over experts (eg Zagats)?

From the perspective of a web searcher, a SERP with reviews for four [Buffalo Grove dentists] written by amateurs beats a SERP with zero reviews written by experts.

From the perspective of a large advertising firm, consistently replicating that at scale gives you a lot more inventory to sell.

One could say something similar regarding content farms and big daddy G.

Zagats is primarily crowdsourced.

I think they do things like filter out reviews from a user that has only posted one review, or if your name appears to be fake, etc. But who knows how exactly their algorithm works.

They're afraid of competitors leaving negative reviews for a business and there's probably something to that, but there's no transparency about it. And they've been doing the extortion thing for a while now: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/yelp-under-fire-from-...

I always thought it would be great if there was a Yelp for landlords - because landlords are rarely held accountable and it's not like you ask for references before you sign a lease - but there would probably be too many false reviews posted to make it work or tenants wouldn't feel comfortable speaking freely (because unfortunately tenants still need references). There's actually a website trying it, but doesn't seem like it's going anywhere right now: http://www.donotrent.com

Hopefully people will see Yelp for what it is: a small sample of the population that may be dissimilar to you writing probably biased reviews.

Why downvoted?

That's a mighty fine business you have there. Shame if anything were to happen to all your positive reviews. Maybe... advertising with us could help with that?

"they are convinced it filtered at least some of the positive reviews after the Braders refused to buy advertising."

If I was Yelp, I'd try to address this accusation somewhere.

I wonder if there's not an important distinction being lost somewhere between free speech and Google.

the Better Business Bureau has been doing this for years. Welcome to the real business world.

Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay?

So why hasn't that happened? Because of libel laws, for one thing. RICO for another. Best answer would be a class action to subpoena Yelp for the IP & personal info of the posters of questionable negative reviews that had survived the removal of legitimate positive reviews, and file a lawsuit against the authors and Yelp for libel. A few thousand of those and they'll be pushed back into their corner.

2+2 Poker Forum has been doing this in the online casino industry for awhile... but they're real criminals anyway: http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/poker-complaints/45662-2...

Ironically, mild extortion is the point of the Tribune's "What's Your Problem?" column.

People who can't get results from local businesses write the column, where they're publicly shamed into doing something to help the consumer.

Whether yelp's business model meets the definition of extortion is debatable ( either way, i find it distasteful ). However, there is nothing extortionist about this.

> Ironically, mild extortion is the point of the Tribune's "What's Your Problem?" column.

I don't think so. I can see why you'd say that---there's a certain family resemblance---but extortion when someone threatens to reveal a bad thing for their own gain; WYP is actually revealing a bad thing for the gain of the reader. If Jon Yates (the WYP author) ever ended a phone call "if you pay me (or otherwise grant me consideration) I won't run this column," then that would turn it into extortion.

As I think about it further, another thing that makes it not-extortion is that with WYP the company that did someone wrong is given a chance to make it right, even before the deed is revealed. That's not typically a feature of extortion.

(Edit: clarify last paragraph)

If you consider consumer advocacy columns to be a form of extortion... consider that the newspaper doesn't request money from the subject to "fix" the column.

The people that ask this Tribune reporter for help are people that can't get a problem solved by another means because the company is uncooperative or in denial about the problem.

So when someone calls the business and says "Hi, I'm calling from the Chicago Tribune, where I'm going to write a story about you that will be read by half a million readers", do you think that will get a better outcome to the problem than the individual calling again for the 25th time?

Sure it will. But if the business had done nothing wrong, journalistic ethics (which play no role in the "moderating" position taken by Yelp between "customer reviews") would stipulate that the newspaper could not report anything other than verifiable fact.

But the business owner (or government agency in most cases with Trib/WYP) see it as "if I don't fix this issue, it's going to be in the newspaper where my boss will see it".

The reporter doesn't have to be unethical in the slightest. The message is implied and, in most cases from what I've read in the Tribune over the years, very effective.

Wrong, but with the right attitude. A while ago, SEOMoz reported a similar problem with ripoff report:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-ripoff-report-la...

Apparently, suing them for libel laws is impossible because of CDA, but suing them under RICO might work. CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users. RICO is an anti-mafia law that says if you are part of an organization that causes illegal things to happen, you could also be liable.

(IANAL)

>CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users.

how about manipulating the content posted by their users - hiding some parts of it and prominently show other?

I think if one were to try to sue them, one would have to mount an attack along this vector. The editorial nature of their review system could be seen as a generator of new content (even if it is based on used-submitted content); the end result (in terms of message and tone) is considerably different to the initial material.

I wonder though if such an approach has any legal merits. I've heard of something similar with copyright, where aggregating data for example and presenting it in new ways is copyrightable. I think one could expand upon that approach and use it as a basis for the complaint.

Am I the only one who believes that yelp is prolly telling the truth and that it was just a coincidence? It sounds quite plausible to me that their algorithms work in the way, that are described in the article.

Just because it's algorithmic doesn't mean it's legal or clean. I can write an algorithm that searches your cookies for porn sites, figures out who employs you, and emails you a customized extortion threat. If their algorithm works the way it's described in the article, then it'll downrank or remove 10 legitimate, positive posts from real customers if they're made in one day, and will preserve and uprank 1 illegitimate negative post from a competitor, unless the unwilling subject of this debate agrees to pay to remove the negative review. That's the definition of extortion, and if ever there was an algorithm written for that purpose, the one described in the article is it.

The way I understand this is, that he was not asked to pay to have the negative review removed, just for advertising, which was totally unrelated to his reviews.

He was asked to pay for advertising. He wasn't happy with previous dealings with yelp, so he declined. Then, all of the positive reviews that were on the site mysteriously disappeared. One plausible explanation is that all of the positive reviewers removed their responses. Another one is that all of the positive reviewers weren't real. But a third explanation is that they were removed precisely because he chose not to pay for advertising. And in the business owner's mind, that is what happened.

If there was a reasonable or non-negligible possibility that removal of the positive reviews resulted from his failure to pay the bribe, then the onus is on the company to provide records to the contrary. That's the point of subpoenaing the poster of the negative comment that survived; not to sue him directly, but to establish the mechanics of and facts arising from Yelp's algorithm, and to establish a pattern of extortion.

Consider: Yelp's algorithm could just as easily flag EVERYONE who gets a single star review for a sales phone call.

Isn't the burden of proof typically assigned to the accuser?

Depends if you live in the US or the UK, when it comes to libel.

Can you explain how libel differs between the US and the UK?

Here, http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=libel+differences+us+uk

(the top link is a pretty good one)

This case is clearly in the US.

No, you are not. I am fairly confident that Yelp behaves above-board. It has a few hundred sales people making a lot of calls and I don't doubt that there are isolated incidents of questionably behavior. I also believe there is a lot of mis-interpretation. For example, advertisers get to choose one review to display at the top of the list. This feature is usually twisted by detractors beyond recognition.

I want to believe Yelp is above board - but the sheer mountain of accusations leveled against them is not encouraging.

It certainly seems like the majority of people complaining about tend to be mom and pop operations with little or no internet savvy. This tends to foster a paranoid attitude, sort of like when you know nothing about cars and take your car to a new mechanic.

On the other hand, Yelp is walking a thin line with their business model.

Yep, it's the modern day version of the good old fashioned shakedown. Maybe not as ruthless as the mafia of the 1930s, but the basic idea remains the same.

>This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up.

"It's good to be the King."

Does anyone know a place where I can post my review of Yelp.com?

You can review it on Yelp.com: http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco

Reading this was fascinating and considering the number of unhappy reviewers over happy, their own 3-star rating seems far-fetched.

I'll wager $100 (to charity) that their 3500 ratings equate to a 3 star rating.

You can owe me: http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...

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