
Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It - jv22222
http://justinvincent.com/page/1874/yelp-you-cost-me-2000-by-suppressing-genuine-reviews-heres-how-you-fix-it
======
lazerwalker
Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as
a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid
services.

A company I used to freelance for found that after they stopped paying Yelp
for a premium account, they started seeing more negative reviews and a number
of their positive reviews were filtered out. They got almost daily phone calls
from Yelp marketing types essentially suggesting that if they renewed their
subscription, the negative reviews would 'disappear'.

This was a few years ago, so maybe things have changed since then. Either way,
I wouldn't hold your breath for a better review verification system.

~~~
pushingbits
This is supposedly happening all the time, yet no one has managed to catch it
on tape for some reason. I can't think of a credible explanation for the lack
of hard evidence (and lawsuits).

~~~
asmithmd1
Hey CamperBob it looks to me like you have been hell banned. All your comments
are listed as dead

------
underwater
I don't know if he's just being coy by saying this is an accident on Yelp's
part.

The actual reviews are here: [http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-
moving-and-stor...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-
storage-valley-village). It's pretty obvious there is something fishy about
the unfiltered reviews. Each reviewer first left a one line review "Amazing!!!
one of a kind..one of the best sushi place" and "the best of the best" before
their very detailed, glowing review of the movers. If that's what it takes to
fool the spam filter then something is very wrong. By contrast one of the
filtered reviewers has ten measured, thorough reviews but his review has been
banned for ToS violations.

Yelp really needs to disclose which vendors have a business relationship with
them. They should also make the filtered reviews easier to see (place the link
next to the unfiltered review count) and remove the damn CAPTCHA. I regularly
try to check the filtered reviews but can't because the CAPTCHA is too
difficult to read.

~~~
colomon
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I was unable to find the sushi reviews
here... Is Yelp changing the reviews as we read them?

~~~
underwater
Click on Abigail and Bob's names for their review history.

~~~
colomon
Gotcha. Damn, I see what you mean. If that's all it takes to game the system,
it's amazing that their system isn't completely overwhelmed by fake reviews...

------
roguecoder
We've seen this result before, from Wikipedia:
<http://thedartmouth.com/2007/10/22/news/wiki>

They found that there were two patterns of content contribution: people who
wrote one review and people who wrote lots. For people who wrote one review,
anonymous contributions were higher quality than signed, and those single
reviews were higher quality than people who contributed multiple reviews.

Chances are good your most valuable reviews are coming from the long tail and
your least accurate reviews are coming from people who are posting lots, but
potentially with sockpuppet accounts. Tossing out your most accurate reviews
in an attempt to suppress the latter seems counterproductive.

~~~
shangrila
This needs to be higher. This is exactly the reason why what the article calls
"Assumption X" is flawed.

------
ChuckMcM
Yelp is the poster child of the disingenuous Internet problem.

In a nutshell the problem is that people who are not verifiable by "the
service" provide information or data which is essential to the operation of
the "the service." Further the beneficiaries of the service (customers) are
not paying for the service, and the people who can be harmed or benefit from
the service (establishments) have every motivation to game the system to
increase business and little downside.

So your business which has modestly thin margins to begin with, grows slowly,
and the more popular it gets the more it tries to get gamed and the more
margins are squeezed if you're paying people to filter those reviews.

There aren't really any 'good' answers. But there are other examples of
businesses like this that have done well. The ones that do well however use
the 'review' portal to push more customers to the 'value' area where higher
rates of returns are to be had.

I hope someone writes up Yelp, Ripoffreport, TripAdvisor, Expedia, and
AngiesList up for a Harvard Business Review group study. There have been a lot
of experiments in this space taking different tacks and it would be
interesting to compare their effectiveness.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I swear by AngiesList for services like moving companies.

They just called us up a couple weeks ago and sat on the phone for over a half
hour (because we were willing) taking reviews from us on a bunch of companies
that we had used.

This is why it costs money; they actually provide a service. If they don't
have enough reviews, they hire people to call you up and write up the reviews
for you.

~~~
vbl
Yea, but they were the first ones to restart advertising with Rush Limbaugh.
And their system is just as game-able, albeit at a slight cost.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
It's a pretty expensive undertaking. You have to be a subscriber (at non-
trivial cost) to be a member/reviewer. The vendor would have to create
multiple puppet accounts at $20/pop to shill up reviews. But, what of all the
_other actual_ reviewers that will write bad ones? You tend to see patterns in
the reviews and, when a shining review of a vendor leaves me skeptical, I
always look at the members' other reviews to see if they left at least 2 or
more. If they did, then I suspect less that they're in cahoots with the one
vendor.

The Limbaugh thing is unfortunate, that's true.

~~~
jonknee
If you're always double checking reviewers, it's easy to do the same thing on
Yelp, or anywhere else for that matter. Most people don't, which is why Yelp
filters and Amazon ranks.

------
bobbydavid
_Disclaimer: I don't work for Yelp but I have created other user-ratings-based
sites before._

It's not entirely fair to criticize Yelp for under-emphasizing negative
reviews.

One of the big hurdles to overcome on a user ratings site is that people are
most motivated to write reviews when they are outraged. There is a massive
selection bias, and if nothing is done to alleviate this, your site runs the
risk of becoming a soap box for ranting.

You work harder to get positive reviews than negative ones. If you receive 2
bad reviews and 2 good ones, that does not mean 50% of people are
dissatisfied.

This should be the motivation for preferencing good reviews over lots of one-
off bad reviews.

BUT: Yelp made the cardinal sin of "objective" ratings sites: their profit
comes from the entities they are rating. Ergo everything on their site is
questionable.

~~~
pbreit
I'm not sure I can agree with that. Negative reviews are almost always far
more helpful than positive reviews. Review sites should be careful about
referencing positive reviews. The gold standard is Consumers Reports which is
much more balanced than the average interent review site (where everything
gets 4 stars) and thus much more helpful.

~~~
bbrtyth
Speaking as an app developer, sometimes people get furious over things that
are clearly stated before they download it. It really is easier to get
complaints, I can see usage stats that show many more people using my apps
daily.

~~~
drcube
So I read the complaint, and that thing that was clearly stated before is now
reiterated. If it doesn't bother me, I go ahead and buy your app.

Good reviews are worthless to me as a consumer. What I want are details, good
and/or bad, that I can use to evaluate my purchase ahead of time. "This is
great!!!", "I would use it again!" are devoid of information.

If negative reviews are more informative, then I assure you, you should
welcome them over a bunch of five-star "great!"s.

Besides being informative for me, the user, they should be valuable to you,
the business owner. Nobody maintains an "attaboy" database, but you better
keep track of bugs and fix them if you expect to grow or even survive in this
economy.

~~~
bbrtyth
You are more willing to read than most, I guess.

Legitimate complaints are welcome, I never implied they were not.

------
edw519
1995

Q: How can you verify the quality of a < mover / restaurant / hairdresser /
babysitter / dentist / chiropractor / handyman / etc.>?

A: Ask your < friend / relative / neighbor / workmate / schoolmate / etc.>.

2009

Q: Same question.

A: Don't need no stinkin' people. We have the internets!

2012

Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it?

A: Use the 1995 solution.

~~~
gdilla
Maybe a shamless plug, but I work on mobile apps at Fodor's Travel. We've been
doing print travel guides for 75 years. We now have apps, in addition to
books.

We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops,
hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we
hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have
our hip moments). So in a way, we're the anti-UGC. When you have crowds of
people, all the ratings become a noisey 3-4 stars. Including Burger King.
That's why I think Fodor's content is a good alternative. We're in the travel
space, not local, but, it's a refreshing alternative.

Oh, and all our apps are FREE.

<http://www.fodors.com/mobile-apps/>

~~~
rogerbinns
Places have good days and bad days (or even hours). Your reviewers could get
made. While the reviews may be spot on, they are a one point in time random
sample.

The other problem is that not everyone is the same. For example I absolutely
hate "attentive" staff in a restaurant (let me eat in peace and if I want
something I'll ask for it), but want the check as quickly as possible on
finishing while others like to slowly wind down. A regular reviewer probably
won't mention either of these because that is normal to them.

The existence of multiple reviewers means one will be more like me and would
mention these issues which would make me go somewhere else while others who
enjoy that kind of experience would be more likely to come. This doesn't make
anyone right or wrong, but does show how different reviewers help and why the
lowest review scores have the most informative reviews.

~~~
klodolph
As a counterpoint, I don't like the same movies Roger Ebert likes. But his
opinions are consistent, and I know well enough where we are different, that I
can usually estimate from the text of his reviews how well I'd like a given
movie.

Reviewers may prefer attentive staff, but the good reviewers (which exist)
know that not everyone shares their preferences. That's the difference between
a good review and a bad review: you can translate a good review into your own
viewpoint and decide for yourself.

When I think of noisy one star reviews, I mostly think of the one star review
for a microprocessor where the guy didn't use a heatsink and the motherboard
melted. There are plenty of folk who come across well in writing but are
monstrous in person, I'd never expect to trust their restaurant reviews, and I
might not be able to identify them either.

------
tatsuke95
Over and over and over again I read negative articles about Yelp. These kind
of places are ripe for scammers. These businesses _know_ that you're randomly
searching for a service, don't know you and don't plan on ever seeing you
again. Yelp's system is, apparently, very easy to game. They've been accused
of extortion. And yet, billion dollar valuation. It's laughable.

We're so out of touch that people are talking about how this space is ripe for
disruption and a new startup. Umm, Yelp is an extremely young company. I guess
once you're public you're seen as old hat? Pump and dump, and move on to the
next thing. Unbelievable.

------
dhyasama
The hiding of reviews has made Yelp virtually useless. I like the identity
verification idea. I implemented the Equifax version and it's very simple to
code. I believe it cost us in the neighborhood of $1/verification. That may
outweigh the value of a verified Yelp user though, but I have no idea of the
Yelp economics.

------
teen
I have a friend that works as a veterinarian. Yelp called his business often
to try to get an advertising deal. After he declined, many of his 5 star
reviews disappeared from the site. After losing a lot of business, he signed
up for the advertising. The next day all of the 5 star reviews returns. This
was just a few months ago.

~~~
derwiki
Then he should sue. Every case brought against Yelp has been thrown out so
far. I'd imagine that if this racket stuff happened, at least -one- case would
come to fruition.

------
simonw
The proposed solution sounds incredibly easy to game - as a moving company, I
could create a bunch of fake, one-off profiles with complaints about one of my
competitors and destroy their Yelp reputation. Unfortunately, I don't think
it's possible for an algorithm to detect the difference between a bunch of
angry one-time posters and a coordinated reputation attack.

This is why I've gone off sites like Yelp for recommendations, and instead
stick to places like Foursquare which rely much more heavily on the behaviour
of the people that I know. Seeing that several of my friends have been
somewhere more than once is a much stronger recommendation signal than a bunch
of strangers giving something five stars.

~~~
jv22222
You need a valid, fully qualified, unique credit history for each new account.
How is that easy to game? Are you assuming that the moving company will get
all their employees to to signup to Yelp and certify their credit history
against fake sock puppet accounts? They maybe able to do it for a few accounts
but pretty soon they would run out of real people to use up... in the mean
time real reviews will be submitted by an endless pool of real people with
valid credit history.

It will be quite easy to tell which reviews are real and which are not. At the
very least it will make the company look questionable because 50% of reviews
will be 5 star and 50% will be one star. The main issue is we need to get
valid reviews out of the filter so that Yelp users can more easily make their
mind up.

As it stands a lot of real reviews are hidden and a lot of fake reviews are
exposed. Simply by exposing real reviews you level the playing field.

~~~
hncommenter13
Say what? Yelp is pulling credit histories of people who join the site? If
they are, that is _way_ out of bounds for what users typically expect when
joining an online review site. As a simple reviewer, I'm not engaging in any
business with them, they're not offering me credit, and pulling a credit
report on some anonymous internet user would not only be expensive but would
require some serious disclosure (as having credit reports pulled actually
impacts one's credit score). Not only that, but if they are doing it, it
doesn't seem to be working very well.

Besides, I never supplied sufficient information for Yelp to connect me to my
credit report without doing some seriously ethically questionable data mining.

Why do you believe that Yelp does this? If so, that would be more surprising
to most users than the pay-for-play behavior we're seeing here.

~~~
Maxious
Did you read the article before commenting? The article proposes that Yelp
should provide people the option to use their credit rating to prove they are
not a sockpuppet in return for Yelp displaying their review. It is only an
option, credit ratings are only used because they are a pre-existing
identification and authentication source and most importantly YELP IS NOT
DOING THIS YET.

~~~
hncommenter13
As a matter of fact I did, and you're right: I mis-read the parent comment as
present tense vs. potential future tense. My apologies.

That said, I think some of the problems with the credit report solution still
stand; namely that pulling credit histories has a cost (both to the reviewer
and to Yelp). I would worry about what they would do with that information
beyond merely authenticating me as a "real person" and I would expect that
fewer people would be willing to review a local donut shop if doing so
required a credit pull.

------
ed209
It would be interesting to see a crowd-sourced recommendation site based only
on positive recommendations. Something like a Net Promoter score to tell me
where is good. i.e. you can only leave feedback for a place if you would
actually recommend it to someone.

Every business can have bad days, and a negative review can put a prospective
customer off even if actually 99% of the time that's a good business.

This isn't really a comparative recommendation site like yelp, the scenario
would be something like a user saying what they want to do (like eat burgers
on friday) then people would only recommend place to go. Kind of like Quora
for places.

Eventually you could build a decent picture of business that are recommended
multiple times to start making suggestions beyond the crowd sourced
suggestions.

~~~
mdc
Personally, I use the negative reviews much more than the positives.
Especially on business reviews on Angie's List or book reviews on Amazon, I
get a lot more info from the negatives. The company itself is usually able to
tell me the positives. I don't let a few negatives rule out my business, but
it allows me to compare more accurately between alternatives.

~~~
ed209
If I'm in planning mode and I don't know where I should go eat burgers on
Friday, I don't want to know where _not_ to go, I want to know where I should
go.

Of course, if I want to look a specific place or product, pos and neg reviews
are useful.

~~~
pavel_lishin
But if you're in a "I'm moving across the country" mode, a negative review of
a moving company may be worth much more than a positive review. (Possibly
$2,000 more, in this case.)

------
mrgreenfur
Yelp has been routinely hiding bad reviews and fixing good reviews to the top.
It is a total scam and a total extortion scheme for local businesses.

------
Aloisius
Personally I just Yelp would have some sort of collaborative filtering engine.
They kind of have a social one, but my friends' opinions are often as bad as a
random stranger's.

What people review on Yelp is subjective and Yelp makes it hard to filter out
people's biases because of their one dimensional rating system. When people
review a restaurant, they review the service, the food, the atmosphere and the
overall value. For some people, paying $200 on a meal is outrageous regardless
of how epic the food might be. For others, they don't even look at the check
when they pay and value doesn't factor into their ratings.

Yelp doesn't ask you to rank the businesses you like on a scale of best to
worst, so people rate things based on some internal weighting scale that
probably shifts slightly from review to review. I may have a 5-star taco trunk
right next to a 5-star review for the French Laundry. They aren't equal.

What people review is also temporal. God help a business if there is say, some
construction going on across the street, the patron was in a bad mood and
becomes argumentative or the chef is sick and food quality dips for a night.
Or maybe the waiter just broke up with his girlfriend. Maybe they run out of
the one thing the patron really wants to eat. Any of these things can make
someone walk away and feel the business is poor.

Businesses and people also change over time, I have reviews on Yelp for 5
stars from 5 years ago for places that have either gone downhill or simply
don't match my current taste.

People also tend to only review things they either really liked/loved or hated
which results in most businesses (especially in SF) as being rated 3.5-4 stars
making Yelp pretty useless without looking at the underlying reviews.

A collaborative filtering engine could fix a lot of these problems. At the
very least I'll match people who have my own biases and normalize people's
ratings. Of course it still doesn't fix the temporal issues, but I don't think
that's insurmountable.

~~~
cloudkj
That's an interesting idea. Is the main motivation of your suggestion to find
a way to enable you to better discover things you might like without relying
purely on reviews and ratings? In general, I agree that ratings and reviews
have inherent biases that are hard to smooth out. There are so many more
dimensions to it, such as how much weight you apply to a review written by
someone that is trying a certain type of food for the first time.

Do you think that you would see better results if Yelp was able to use a
collaborative filtering approach to somehow personalize their results such
that they more closely match your tastes and preferences - based on other
users' data?

------
Sivart13
What's most shocking at this point is that this story has been up for seven
hours and Yelp hasn't bothered to fix the page in question, the wrongness of
which could be observed by any human with eyes:
[http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-
stor...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-storage-
valley-village)

~~~
dcpdx
Wow, those 1-star reviews are pretty scathing too. I had no idea that negative
reviews were filtered like that; that pretty much ruins my trust in the review
component of the site. From now on, I'll be using Yelp for contact info. and
price points...

------
derwiki
For the record: the sales organization at Yelp has a read-only copy of
business data in Salesforce. Salespeople are not able to fiddle with reviews
in the main database. They're two completely different systems. There's no
possible way a salesperson can hide/show reviews to try and sell advertising.
The salesperson can _claim_ to be able to do it, but they're lying.

~~~
ceejayoz
Does Yelp policy forbid sales people from being friends with customer service
/ database / etc. folks?

------
IanDrake
Any review on Yelp that says "We" or mentions the name of the person that
assisted them at company is most certainly fake.

Example:

" _We_ were really worried about where to stay on Las Vegas, but then we
called hotel X and _Margo_ sounded so nice and welcoming on the phone that
_we_ just knew it was the right choice."

------
mbesto
_Question based identity verification can be very painless._

For you, but not the vendor. See PayPal.

 _Question based identity verification processes are already used and supplied
under the hood by agencies such as TransUnion, Equifax & Experian._

And that leads to friction. Yelp got it's massive user base from frictionless
technology.

I don't like Yelp's business practices just as much as the next person, but
this is a human interaction issue that isn't solved by a simple algorithm, nor
is it solved purely by (mind you, costly) human being based committees.

------
JohnnyFlash
This isn't really Yelp's fault. Sites like this always have fake reviews
mingled in with those that are real. The solution?

Assume people with a 4-5 star review are competent. GET MULTIPLE QUOTES.
Doesn't matter if they have 5*, if you feel something is off with them they
you avoid.

You also will find out when a quote is too cheap/too expensive and reduce your
risk to getting conned.

Don't blame the internets or Yelp. Blame youself for not doing due diligence.

------
schiffern
So, you want Angie's List.

Is anyone surprised that a recommendation site that gets its money from the
businesses is less than honest? Is anyone surprised that when they get popular
they turn into a protection racket?

Say it with me. "If you're not paying, you're the product." Or in this case,
the club.

------
tocomment
This sounds terrible. I wonder if this space is ripe for a new startup to
gradaully take over?

If you guys made a competitor to Yelp, how would you improve on it?

~~~
spotting
We have put a lot of time and effort into making a local recommendation engine
that is primarily powered by your real friends and acquaintances.

I'm not sure how it compares to other sites, but you can see the URL in my
profile.

------
AlexBlom
Wow. Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative
reviews.

The hard part is staying one step ahead of less-legitimate accounts. There's
always somebody trying to cheat the system, and stopping these users often
results in a tradeoff.

~~~
twoodfin
> Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative
> reviews.

But a continuous, consistent pattern of one-shot negative reviews is also not
particularly difficult for a competing business (or anyone with a grudge) to
reproduce.

This is a hard problem, and I don't think the credit check-style identity
verification questions suggested in the post are going to solve it. For one
thing, I think an overwhelming number of people would find it creepy. They're
trying to tell people about a bad moving company, not get a car loan.

Putting more of your "valuable" online identity at stake seems likely to help.
I hate to say it, but "Log in using your Facebook account" suddenly gives Yelp
a lot more data to exploit to decide just how much trust they should put in
your reviews.

~~~
jv22222
Why would they find it creepy? You wouldn't need to say your using credit
history. It would be as simple as asking the user a question "Please validate
your a real person by answering these few questions".

As far as the user is concerned it's just a few questions and answers.

~~~
masterzora
Have you seen the questions they use? They range from "which of these
addresses have you previously lived at" to "which of these companies do you
have a loan with" to "how much is your loan payment" among others. They're
pretty creepy and made even more so by the fact that these are the same
questions you answer to prove your identity to, say, the credit bureaus or
your creditors. It's not the sort of stuff one should be answering lightly.

------
exue
Despite all its flaws, Yelp is the best solution I've had for finding good
restaurants and other services. I love being able to read reviews by locals I
might randomly see, browse through their profiles and see what else they like.
In the vast majority of cases the crowdsourced reviews are awesome.
Unfortunately their verification and filtering system is weak, and needs major
improvement (an identity verification program would be awesome). Yelp is still
a great service overall, and the fact that I use it over ZAGAT or anything
else tells you a lot about how effective it is.

------
timdorr
So, the solution is replacing the CAPTCHA with my SSN? All to post a review?
Yeah, that doesn't seem reasonable to me...

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yelp wouldn't get your SSN; they'd only get a boolean response as to whether
you're an actual human being or not.

~~~
steve8918
Unless, of course, Yelp or whoever else used the service also ran a man-in-
the-middle and captured the information being passed back and forth.

~~~
jv22222
SSN would not need to be involved at any point during a question based
verification process.

~~~
timdorr
How else would they know what credit report to look up and what questions to
ask?

------
droithomme
The problem with the proposed solution of verifying ID is that people who
leave honest bad reviews often enough get harassment sued by angry dishonest
business owners, who it turns out are more likely to harass and sue companies
than the honest companies are.

The main problem here is that Yelp is a racket as well, this has been known
for some time. Those using it, well caveat emptor.

There are other review sites out there that are not as morally compromised as
Yelp due to their business model being modeled on a mafia protection racket of
"Pay us and we can help these bad reviews go away."

------
mapster
I agree, though the example gripe is problematic as the moving industry is
largely unregulated. It is full of outfits that are subcontracted by the big
movers. Extortion is commonplace (moving truck is near your new home. they
stop and call on phone asking for $2k more before they arrive and unload your
property), and is considered a contract dispute and the police will not get
involved, citing such.

------
mamasays
Yelp has been having problems for a long time, especially with small business
owners. The site is killing small business owners, just do a Google search and
you will find endless complaints about the site. Truth is Yelp cannot control
the reviews, they can't guarantee them and their Filter... if it works only
50% of the time then it is worthless.

------
3am
There's no technical workaround for having good references from trusted source
for something as important as movers, a dentist, a skilled tradesperson, a
doctor, et al. (edit: I don't care, it's true. Even Angie's List isn't great)

------
pauljonas
I stopped using Yelp after I noted that reviews I submitted were only
_visible_ to me, if I was logged into the site.

That defeats the purpose of an _online_ review site -- if the review is only
_visible_ to me, why am I posting to Yelp, and giving them valuable data they
just will _sit_ on, as opposed to logging in my own local host `reviews.txt`?

I noticed also that a number of favorable reviews, seemingly written by
authentic reviewers were also _suppressed_ in like fashion.

See Amazon for a site that gets posting reviews mostly correct.

------
darkblob32
I use Yelp to get ideas about what places to eat, but recommendations and
confirmations from friends is usually the final say. I really like Yelp, but
things like this keep coming up and it's hard to trust that their heart is in
the right place. Not to mention how slow they are at staying competitive with
other services. Check-in feature seemed to take forever, and I still can't
believe they haven't tried to implement customer appreciation cards a la
Stampt.

------
Quizzy
Let's talk about the mobile only world: would a native mobile app be self-
verifying in that only a mobile phone could download and use the app - so
every review requires a real smartphone to post the review. Although
"reputation" companies could game this situation by buying 1000 smartphones,
but then you would have 1000 smartphones with the same pattern of up-posting
such that it would be easier for an algorithm to recognize these "planted"
phones.

------
pbreit
I generally defend Yelp against a lot of mis-informed opinions but this is
pretty bad. It's clear Yelp is hiding a lot of legit reviews. There's a decent
case Yelp should be erroring on the side of showing not hiding. At a minimum,
Yelp clearly needs to improve its algorithms. As the OP describes, a bad
experience with a service provider could easily lead to a 1 star review from a
first time reviewer. And these are _very_ helpful reviews.

------
pg_bot
Honestly the author is over thinking his solution to the problem. The way to
solve this problem is to give people the option of viewing reviews that Yelp
believes are of dubious origin. Add another section to the reviews page, and
let the users decide how to process the extra information but frame it as
possibly being untrustworthy with an explanation of why it was tagged as
untrustworthy.

~~~
colomon
They already allow you to click through to the reviews they have filtered out.
How about having two average ratings, one for only "filtered in" reviews and
one for all reviews?

~~~
dcpdx
And the font is about 10px and 30%K buried in the bottom corner. I can
understand that would be desirable if the algorithm was more accurate in
filtering bogus reviews, but that's clearly not the case so it just seems
unscrupulous.

------
bbrtyth
Remember, everyone, if you aren't paying for it, you might be the product. In
this case, a Yelp user is the product that Yelp sells to businesses by
featuring 5-star reviews and burying the 1-star review.

Featuring the 1-stars and burying the 5-stars would also be quite the
incentive for a business to pay Yelp, but it would be cynical to assume they
are doing that, too.

~~~
mrobataille
I agree with you completely.

------
rush-tea
Like what everyone is saying, Yelp review system is very easy to game. Just
create a one off profile, and hype the business. Yelp algorithm only allows
good reviews getting posted while the bad ones are buried. Why? Because good
reviews generate traffic to Yelp which in turn help Yelp getting money from
advertiser.

Five stars review system is flawed.

------
int3rnaut
Would anyone be interested in disrupting this space? My friend and I have been
working on something we quite like that deals with subjectivity/ethics
concerns, but it's a tough space to be in, and we'd love some help. If you
want to get in touch, email us at questionasker[at]liveDotCA

------
Otto42
Wait, people actually use Yelp? Seriously?

I find that to be the most shocking statement in the article.

~~~
NZ_Matt
Of course they do, why else would it be so popular?

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gzervas
True, Yelp got the filtering completely backwards in this instance. But, do
you base any economic decision on two 5-star reviews from two Yelpers with 0
friends and 4 reviews combined?

~~~
jv22222
Not everyone is a sophisticated Yelp user with an understanding of social
networks. A lot of people will simply see two 5-star reviews, zero negative
reviews, and think that looks like a safe bet.

~~~
gzervas
Are you saying it's Yelp's responsibility to protect unsophisticated users
from themselves? Also, I am not quite sure "a lot of people" will behave as
you describe.

~~~
suresk
If one has to become a sophisticated Yelp user and do a substantial amount of
detective work in order to determine if Yelp reviews are legit in order to get
any value out of it (or at least not get actively misled by it), then what
value does Yelp provide?

------
garrett_smith
Justin, as a business owner, you are not Yelps customer. Yelp customer, or at
least the one they care about, is really the people who use the site.

------
Symmetry
This seems like pretty much the exact problem that social networking was
designed to solve.

------
debacle
I'm not surprised at all. Hasn't Yelp been considered kind of shady for yearS?

------
antidaily
I only use Yelp to see whats nearby.

------
AznHisoka
Yelp doesn't care because it doesn't affect their bottom line.

If you're not a customer, you're the product.

~~~
bloggergirl
"The customer is the product." - Don Draper :)

------
pitdesi
Is there a startup opportunity for an identity verification service whereby
you do the ID verification once and then each service that wants to use it
gets charged a smaller amount?

Example: consumer goes to idverificationsite.com, registers there for free-
they ask out of wallet questions to verify identity, potentially do a minimal
background check too.

You then use this login with Yelp, AirBnB, Getaround, etc.

Yelp, Getaround, Airbnb pay idverificationsite.com some small amount per
verified person. Removes some of the friction of ID verification/spreads cost
around.

Sidenote: the BBB is the worst offender of these protection rackets -
<http://feefighters.com/blog/bbb-accreditation/>

Also - I've just decided to start posting reviews to Google rather than Yelp,
they lost me as a product after reading this thread.

~~~
Philadelphia
There was an interesting article in Inc. magazine a while back about a company
that tried that. They found out that no sites wanted to use the service, even
though they saw how it might solve their problems, because it would
immediately make their non-verified users less valuable.

[http://www.inc.com/magazine/201112/case-study-josh-levy-
and-...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201112/case-study-josh-levy-and-ross-
cohen-of-beenverified.html)

------
robatsu
Identity verification and such are only part of the problem. Even if it is a
bona fide person writing the review (and ignoring the problems w/Yelp
filtering practices), a truly valid review only comes from one who the readers
can be assured really was a customer of Royal Movers in addition to some of
the other, lower identity bars.

So how could that work?

------
ckdarby
I have no pity for this guy...seriously he only went by Yelp's reviews and did
no further research.

This article just proves how stupid consumers can be when making important
decisions.

When I read the article I didn't see the guy mentioning looking up the company
on the BBB or even simply Google'ing "[Company] scams" or "[Company]
scammers".

Yes, Yelp could implement better solutions to protect consumers but ultimately
the consumer needs to do adequate research before purchasing.

~~~
bcrescimanno
So there's a resource out there that claims to let the customer do a good
portion of that research by aggregating real customer reviews and you berate
him for using that research? Calling the guy "stupid" for believing a bunch of
supposedly satisfied real customers while at least 10 extremely negative
customer experiences were hidden from him is bullshit.

