I don't have any sympathy for a site that purposely cripples the web mobile site to force you to install their app. They lock you out of pictures after around 20 so you have to go to desktop or install their crappy app. Yelp will not be missed.
Good. Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.<p>On a more personal note, they also refused to adequately protect my wife when we encountered and reported an unscrupulous vendor who threatened my wife and exposed her personal information on the site.<p>There is a very real need for this kind of thing but Yelp has proven time and time again that they can't be trusted to deliver it.
Good.<p>The Yelp app/site is basically the same it was 5 years ago. Rather than innovate they chose to:<p>- Opt for the shakedown/extortion method of ranking sites (those that advertised with Yelp rank higher, negative reviews can mysteriously disappear for advertisers)<p>- Whine to regulators about Google is stealing content from them (by, you know, serving a snippet of content that Yelp allows to be scraped).<p>- Harass users to install their (shitty) app.<p>This is just bad management/leadership to the core and such a waste opportunity. A telltale sign of this is the demonization of some nefarious third-party and blaming all your woes on them, which they've clearly done with Google. Don't think that's effective? Look at the current state of US politics.<p>I really have no time for these shenanigans.
I can't relate to the negativity I see here. I like Yelp quite a lot. There have been a number occasions where I've found an excellent local restaurant that I wouldn't have otherwise found.<p>Admittedly, you have to know what you're doing. If you're in a food desert, like some parts of the US, you'll need to take those 4 and 4.5 star restaurant profiles with a grain of salt. What I would really like: the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see. This might also protect against paid spam reviews and over-picky reviewers.
I abandoned Yelp as a user pretty quick as it was just too much to filter through so many reviews by people who 1) Had some one off bad experience that is probably not representative of anything. 2) Wished that place they reviewed was like some other place that is kinda the same but ... it's twice the price so why are you comparing?
Yelp is incredibly annoying as a business owner. After signing up to setup basic NAP consistency, they will automatically flag it as some sort of tag often incorrectly and then continue to call and email you asking to spend advertising dollars on their site for months. Even after asking them to no longer do so.<p>I'm glad google reviews and others have taken their place.
In contrast to many posters here, I really like Yelp (as a user, at least, never been a restaurant owner). I sort by number of reviews and find places that are highly rated (4 stars or so) and almost always this has worked well. Other services I've tried are not nearly as easy to use or reliable.
I bet Apple will be snooping around for a cheap acquisition here. Apple already uses Yelp for their place data in Apple Maps and they are still way behind Google.<p>Eventually Apple will probably need to have its own place data if it wants to continue to compete in maps. Yelp would give them a starting point.
Great news! I run a local service company and stopped advertising with Yelp several months ago. No transparency how clicks go to $12 when they used to be $5. That's not even a click to your site, just your Yelp profile still on their site!<p>On top of it, my 5 star reviews keep getting filtered, even ones that have shown for months. Meanwhile two recent 1-star reviews we got with people from brand new accounts still show just fine.<p>GOOD RIDDANCE, hope they go BK. They deserve it.
Does anyone else find that their best restaurant experiences come from places that only show up on a yelp search several pages down (if at all)? A number of years ago I stopped using yelp to find places to eat in my hometown because I found that the app completely overlooked smaller, locally run places for big name places near tourist hot spots.
Yelp ads were completely ineffective for me as a business. I was paying about $900/mo for 3 months (they force a contract) and literally got 0 leads (calls, clicks, messages, etc...). If I was even able to get a project from Yelp ads it would have been worth it. I can't imagine if you're a restaurant (where the average sale is a _lot_ less than web design/development services) that you can make any money advertising on Yelp. No surprise that ad sales are going down/staying stagnant.
Yelp in NYC is infuriating to use. Not only it does not know neighborhoods, it is incapable of identifying rivers that separate areas. Ask it for places in Greenpoint and it would happily include stuff in Manhattan, sometimes well before it runs out of the Greenpoint options which could be OK had Greenpoint not been separated from Manhattan by the East River.<p>Yelp is also happy to manipulate reviews contrary to their denials. It is rather funny, of course, because it seems that no one in the tech leadership of the company understands how easy it is to take a screenshot of a review.
The problem is even now Yelp is probably the best resource out there for finding new restaurants but I find Yelp poorly run. There is no innovation, the UI hasn’t been updated or changed since the first release. They have so much potential, for example, they should have been the leaders in delivery and should have provided the api for Uber eats. They just don’t do anything outside of maintaining the servers for their basic service, at least that’s what it feels like.
These large corporations need to knock off the bullshit and make their websites well developed and designed in-browser apps. Something so simple could save Yelp and many others. There is no need to have a native app unless you require certain hardware features that are unavailable on the browser to meet your apps purpose.
Yelp is one of those YMMV apps. Absolutely terrible for smaller cities like Albuquerque, NM.<p>I miss the days when their competitor, Urbanspoon, was really pushing the envelope on a great customer experience and review variety.
Yelp is full of wannabe food critics/influencer types who complain about the ambience or quality of service. I always get the impression that these people only go to places that are already popular. For things not related to food/drinks, Yelp is no better than Google.<p>Also, they focus too much on search/ratings, so finding a place is harder when you aren't quite sure what you're in the mood for. I hope Yelp focuses more on the discovery aspect, because right now that's happening on Instagram and blogs like Eater.
They've tried to hold restaurants and other small businesses hostage for years and never expected that, given how despised they are, someone would displace them?<p>The way they run their business is comical as well. In my city Yelp is basically a non-factor. Businesses that have 500 Google or OpenTable reviews will often have a dozen Yelp reviews at most, yet Yelp will constantly phone you trying to get you to sign up for their services... Usually very aggressively and during peak business hours.
I've always enjoyed Louis Rossmann yelp rants. A week ago he posted a great interview with some people who made a documentary about yelp practices of bullying businneses to join their service
Link: <a href="https://youtu.be/BHEbVh3Yhrw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BHEbVh3Yhrw</a>
I wonder if there’s a way to get the quality of reviews and rankings from Tabelog in the USA - for those who don’t know its the Japanese equivalent service and diners are so critical that most restaurants have 3 stars, 3.5 is an exceptionally good one and 4 and up generally have Michelin stars; I’ve never been disappointed by a decently rated restaurant on it.<p>The magic sauce for them might be cultural; though there’s definitely room for a better (probably nonlinear) type of reviewing system in the market given how bad quality Yelp reviews are in comparison.
This has probably nothing to do with them losing advertisers, but I really dislike the app UX. Examples:<p>1. Videos auto play in the app, stopping my music or whatever else I'm listening to. And I can't disable that feature.<p>2. Frequent crashes and other glitches (eg, the Recent category doesn't actually show many of the places I visited today).<p>3. No way to save default settings, like sort by rating. So with every search I have to manually set those preferences. Similarly, no way to save searches or even to go back to a previous search I just ran.
I have a question: Would it be possible to do something like Fakespot for Yelp reviews or just restaurant reviews in general?
I can appreciate that the problem is harder than say spotting fake Amazon reviews, but it seems plausible.<p>Given that there is really no good verification for restaurant reviews, there must be a ton of fake reviews out there. In theory, it would not be too hard to periodically crawl reviews and figure out when/if they got deleted and use that dataset to find patterns.
Yelp is an unscrupulous business, however, I do find it useful. I don't read the reviews but I enjoy looking at pictures of food before choosing a restaurant.
Yelp is tanking because it is putting profits before customers.<p>Case in point: let's say you're looking for a restaurant in a certain area, maybe in San Francisco? So you zoom into that area and do a search: find "x" in the map.<p>So what do they do? They zoom out (sometimes, far out) to include some advertisers.<p>Rule #1 if you have a customer-facing product: if you give the users choice, <i>then respect that choice!</i> Always respect the user. Always.
For vegetarians and vegans be sure to try out HappyCow, it's a must have when traveling. Disclaimer: free website but the iOS app costs some money.
Wow, $YELP has almost $1b in revenues, $800m in cash and trading at a $2.5b market cap.<p>Yelp took far too long to go big into self-service advertising.
Well, you don't really have to have distinguished insights to tell that Yelp is doing a horrible job as an advertising company. Their ads are unattractive and annoying. What is fundamentally wrong with their business model is that, good restaurants don't need ads to wow customers: they are already oversubscribed, only troubled ones do.
Foursquare! I've been using it pretty regularly and it always seems to give me cool neighborhood gems compared to over-advertised entires that Yelp gives you. You can kinda even feel that the app was built with some heart.<p>Also, I love the filters on there compared to Google (Google maps always seems to hide a lot of places)
The only redeemable feature on Yelp that I come to often (from Google Maps) is Open Now, where I can fill in a time and it filters for that time. If its close to closing time, its rare that I want to know what's open right now given I've to drive to that location.<p>Other than that, I get the same value prop else where.
Here's to hoping the replacement will implement an old school Netflix style recommendation engine.<p>Some people rate taco bell 5 stars, some 1 star. These people should not influence ratings for eachother.
Don't forget to give Yelp a rating: <a href="https://yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco" rel="nofollow">https://yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco</a>
"Adds zero net new advertising customers" means advertisers are abandoning the site?<p>Money 'abandoned' my wallet when I payed for my friend's dinner and she payed me back.
there was numerous accounts of extortion and bullying in regards to yelp in the past, I am so not suprised by this and it's just going to get worst
Wow people have passionate opinions about Yelp. If I need a quick meal while on the road, I just pick out some fast place. If I want a nice meal, I cook it. Spending a lot of my own money at a restaurant is only very rarely a satisfying experience.
I don't get the negativity here, Yelp is an incredibly useful service; especially living in NYC. With such a dense amount of restaurants in the city, you need some way to cut out the cruft.<p>I'm yet to eat at a Yelp 4-star restaurant in NYC that I didn't think was good. Besides Foursquare as an alternative, the reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, etc. are all way too inflated.