Comment by donall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donall | Hacker News Reader

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The parent observation is really on the money. Hyperlocal recommendations are very interesting, but _paid_ recommendations are a potential gold mine that I think people are only now starting to catch on to.

What I find particularly interesting about it is the potential to produce genuinely relevant advertising. As a simple example, imagine I ask my smartphone where I can find the nearest fast food joint and it tells me there is a McDonald's around the corner. It might also serve an ad that says there is a Burger King one block further away and if I go there and show the ad I will get free fries and a drink with my sandwich.

There are some very interesting possibilities here that we have only begun to scratch the surface of.

For things like that, such a service makes complete sense. But for things that I spend real money on, I've already developed a filter in my brain to weed out anything that looks like paid shilling. This is why I stopped using Google Shopping after it went paid-only, and why I skip the first page of Google Search when researching products.

Now if they could make this a social thing, where real, authenticated, non-paid people recommend a good place to eat or get my suit tailored, I would be on board. Sadly, there is no money in that sort of service, as Yelp found out pretty quickly.

I find that even for topics related to money the top hits on Google are all completely useless spam. I was looking for information about companies selling software components and just found a bunch of "sellyourappnow.com" offering Fruit Ninja clones for a few hundred bucks.

For whatever reason businesses that love their margins more than their customers find it's much more convenient to astroturf services like Yelp than to actually provide something worth buying.

And services like Yelp always seem to find that it's more lucrative to extort money from businesses in exchange for reorganizing their ratings.

I'd love to have a way for regular people to recommend things that was invulnerable to astroturfing but I have no idea what it would look like.

Stack Exchange gets pretty close, with its robust reputation/moderation system.

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