
Lone Yelp review dogs business owner - blahedo
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/problemsolver/ct-biz-0904-problem-brader-20110904,0,5548651,full.column
======
cletus
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.

~~~
pbz
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.

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
pigbucket
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://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34jw)

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

~~~
archangel_one
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...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-
extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635) (via here:
<http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/>)

------
bkbleikamp
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.

~~~
yoda_sl
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.

~~~
bkbleikamp
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?

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

------
shawnee_
_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.

~~~
pbreit
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?

~~~
mcantelon
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>

~~~
brown9-2
A lawsuit filed against them is not proof of anything. That same suit was
thrown out.

~~~
mcantelon
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).

------
pagefruit
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".)

~~~
ShannonO
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.

------
gareim
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.

~~~
cschep
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.

------
yoda_sl
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.

~~~
megablast
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.

~~~
yoda_sl
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.

~~~
megablast
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.

------
pbreit
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.

~~~
termie
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.

~~~
pbreit
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.).

------
wayne_h
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....

------
mikeleeorg
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...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-training-
north-riverside)

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

[http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...](http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34jw)

~~~
mcantelon
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.

~~~
pbreit
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.

------
eps
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.

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

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

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

~~~
pbreit
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>

~~~
huhtenberg
"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.

~~~
pbreit
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.

------
jhdavids8
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!"

------
revorad
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.

~~~
stef25
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.

~~~
revorad
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.

------
kenjackson
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.

~~~
mikeleeorg
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.

------
revorad
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.

------
jeremymims
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.

~~~
akashs
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.

~~~
jeremymims
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.

~~~
akashs
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.

------
spaznode
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

~~~
yoda_sl
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).

~~~
spaznode
Not sure what you mean..rtfm

------
Evgeny
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?

------
marquis
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?

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

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

~~~
johnny22
or maybe the opposite. maybe yelp's competitors paid to have negative reviews.
hah :)

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

------
m0nastic
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.

~~~
jotr99

      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.

~~~
m0nastic
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.

------
rkalla
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>

------
bugsy
#1

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.

#2

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.

#3

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

[http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-
traini...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-training-
north-riverside)

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.

~~~
pbreit
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!

~~~
bugsy
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?

~~~
pbreit
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.

------
dannyr
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.

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

------
stef25
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?

------
flourophore
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)?

~~~
ddw
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-...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/yelp-under-fire-from-
lawsuits-citing-ad-pressure/?ref=yelp)

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.

~~~
ddw
Why downvoted?

------
mtogo
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?

------
callmeed
_"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.

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

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

------
noduerme
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...](http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/poker-
complaints/45662-2-2-evil.html)

~~~
ma2rten
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.

~~~
noduerme
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.

~~~
ma2rten
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.

~~~
noduerme
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.

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

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

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

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

(the top link is a pretty good one)

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

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

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

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

~~~
pbreit
You can owe me: [http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-
ye...](http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-yelps-own-
filtered.html)

