
Yelp Hires Goldman and Citigroup to Lead I.P.O. - monty_singh
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/yelp-hires-goldman-and-citigroup-to-lead-i-p-o/
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danilocampos
It's a shame about Yelp. A great product with truly valuable content, entirely
stagnant.

For one thing, it's awful for discovery of new places. Want to find a high-
rated restaurant near you that serves a specific dish? Well, have a good time
wading through random crap entirely unrelated to that. My favorite recently
was searching for ice cream and getting a _hospital_ , because someone's
review mentioned how the cafeteria _didn't have any_.

Beyond that, what's the point of contributing all this content to Yelp? The
value of the site remains constant whether you review zero businesses or 100.
Back to discovery, Yelp is working with an enormous corpus of data at this
point. You're telling that we can't compare my review behavior against others
who've reviewed the same spots and shake out a few recommendations? Users and
businesses both would really benefit from this.

You could even make things more interesting for more accomplished users,
handicapping individual restaurant scores based on past review behavior.

It's a great tool for vetting if a restaurant you've already discovered is
actually any good. But when you look at all the unique opportunities it has to
really redefine how people find and choose food and other businesses, it's
hard not to shake your head and sigh.

I discovered Yelp when I moved to the Bay Area nearly two years ago. The
product has only plateaued in that time, while my opinion of it has steadily
eroded thanks to its flaky search boning me during mobile food quests. Don't
even get me started about its obnoxious nagging in the mobile app to get you
to use social features.

Is it really worthwhile for investors to buy part of a company with a mostly
bi-coastal, American userbase whose product's best days seem to be behind it?
Is it just a "Hey, invest in us, we're kinda Groupon-y because we make money
from local businesses" kind of thing?

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jaredsohn
>Beyond that, what's the point of contributing all this content to Yelp?

This Quora post lists a few reasons: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-
incentives-to-write-review...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-incentives-
to-write-reviews-on-Yelp-especially-for-those-early-users). (Some reasons
include using it as a food journal, narcissism, reward/punish for good/bad
service, and getting invited to Yelp Elite parties.)

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nupark2
Unfortunately, the majority of the reasons you listed all boil down to the
same one: narcissism.

This winds up being why I find Yelp reviews to be useless; the poster is
trying to tell me about themselves, rather than actually tell me something
useful about the restaurant.

"Believe me, I know -- my grandma is a south east indian polar bear, and I
_know_ good vegan low-carb empanadas! Also, the service was terrible after I
told the waitress she looked fat in that outfit. How rude. Did I mention the
parking situation is just horrriiible? 1 star! I know it's always hard to park
in the haight/midtown/wherever, but pleeease."

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jaredsohn
You may find it interesting that Yelp encourages the story telling. At
<http://www.yelp.com/elite>, they say: "the more people can relate to you, the
more your reviews and opinions start to matter."

I think the idea is that as you use the site, if you find someone whose tastes
seem to match yours and you can relate to the stories/backgrounds that they
include on the site, then you can better trust their reviews for places you
haven't been, similar to how you might trust a friend's recommendations over
that of a random person; it also gives you a guide on how to filter their
recommendations.

In this case, the personal information can be helpful to you in that you know
you can place less emphasis on the review.

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nupark2
That's interesting -- I'm surprised that Yelp would encourage this.

The result seems to be reviews that value the restaurant relative to the
effect that visiting and reviewing the restaurant has on the writer's ego.

This seems to result in a dearth of objective reviews about the food (or
service), and means that I largely can't identify with _any_ of the restaurant
reviewers on Yelp.

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cft
Yelp does not have a powerful network effect like Facebook, its main
distribution mechanism was SEO via Google search. Unlike Google+/Facebook, in
this case Google is in an excellent position to compete, if they smartly
integrate a mix of user-written and Zagat reviews into Android and iPhone maps
(it will take a better product manager than Marissa Mayer though- so the
outcome is highly internal politics dependent)

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dotcoma
if Groupon can do it, we can, too! ;-)

