I trust Yelp/Urbanspoon reviews the same way I trust Amazon reviews: By reading them and looking for clues that the reviewer is real and has astes and concerns similar to mine. I gloss over uncritical reviews, whether they're real or not; a review that says "everything was great but the fries" I'll put stock in.<p>It's possible that astroturfers could start taking that into account, but it's hard to imagine. The kind of people who stuff Yelp reviews generally have personality quirks that would prevent them from allowing any negative feedback.
Part of the point of the review model of Yelp (and Amazon, for that matter) is that you don't have to trust <i>a</i> review. You only have to trust the consensus of all of the reviewers - which, at best, is very, very hard to spoof. When I see a place on yelp with a 4-star average on 1000 reviews, I feel very confident about going there. It's hard to get to that critical mass, but far from impossible - and you don't need someone's "real name." This is actually somewhere where Yelp is doing well, too - they give people a _persistent_ identity. You should trust reviews from someone who's written 100 reviews more than a review from someone who signed up just to review a single place - and Yelp makes that judgment easy by putting the information right in front of you. Blizzard and other strategies have demonstrated that real names aren't necessary for a good community - just persistent names.<p>Also, I have to laugh that the UrbanTag folks approvingly cite the complaint that existing reviews sites are "giving customers “the upper hand” in determining an establishment’s reputation." Well, yes, they are. That's the point. That power has always rested in customers' hands, because that's what reputation is: what <i>other people</i> think of you. You can work on your reputation and "manage" it and "optimize" it, but if it's not what <i>other people think,</i> it's not reputation. Business owners neither need nor deserve control over other people's opinions - look at those asshole doctors that were linked here a while back, forcing customers to sign agreements that amounted to "we can sue you for posting a negative review of us on Yelp."<p>As for unreasonable customers: that's nearly as overblown as the threat of piracy, and if your business can't deal with unreasonable customers gracefully (not the same as caving and giving them what they ask for), you deserve to go out of business.
Review sites are hard.<p>Yelp was wonderful when it first started because the people on it all loved restaurants enough to actually want to sign up to some random site and review them. The community was small and I was easily able to pick out people I trusted and people I didn't.<p>As it grew, more of the general public started reviewing things and things started to go downhill. No longer can I remember who has similar taste as I do or who to trust. There are so many reviews that it has become rather useless. Every business seems to be 3-4 stars from Michelin two star restaurants to the taco cart on the corner.<p>Worse, ratings change over time. Restaurants I rated as 5 stars years ago no longer qualify as 5 stars today, so even when I see someone I know, I have to look at the date of their review and discount appropriately.<p>Compounding things, there are all sorts of reasons why people give negative ratings from food delivery being late (which has nothing to do with your experience going to a restaurant) to having bad service because the restaurant opened the day before to not feeling like you got enough subjective value out of it.<p>Now, if Yelp had a collaborative filtering engine ala Netflix or only showed reviews from people who shared similar taste as I do, it might regain some of its usefulness. Maybe if they did something ala Hacker News and required constant up votes to keep the rating from falling over time? Or an OKCupid-style personality matching matrix to tell if someone is just cheaper than I am or demands a higher level of service.
I don't bother with 5 star or 1 star reviews. Too much emotion to be sensibly reviewed.<p>Three stars provide a nice balance. Things like "food was good, but service was slow." I find more valuable than a 2 paragraph review about how a waiter spilled a glass of water and only comped one entrée or a five paragraph review that can be summarized as "I love this place more than breathing."
> To solve the anonymous review problem, its time to inject real identities into recommendations.<p>People are usually more honest when speaking anonymously -- not the other way around. It may help with astroturfing and flaming temporarily, but competitors and trolls will always find a way around real identity online.
Why doesn't collaborative filtering work for popular review sites? The Netflix recommender is pretty solid. Obviously you aren't likely to have reviewed 200 restaurants in Yelp, but it still seems like it would be effective if you had 10-30.<p>But if I could go to Yelp and have it recommend restaurants based on my past ratings (well I have none now), that would be nice. I'd even take it a step further. I want recommendations of actual dishes.
I'm solving the same problem at <a href="http://tattle.com" rel="nofollow">http://tattle.com</a>.<p>Our pitch is "Local business reviews and recommendations from people you trust."<p>For me, as a vegetarian (<a href="http://tattle.com/#communities/vegetarian" rel="nofollow">http://tattle.com/#communities/vegetarian</a>), the problem with Yelp has always been that I don't have any good way of finding vegetarian-friendly restaurants. They are good for factual queries, but trust is a delicate issue. That's mainly because when you run a search for "vegetarian" on Yelp, you're getting back a list of places that have the word in their name or description, or occasionally a review. But actually, places are not vegetarian, people are vegetarian. So if you want to know what place to go to, you need to know who goes there. That's how we're solving the trust gap (in addition to other problems with reviews).
The signal-to-noise has worsened appreciably on Yelp to the point where I rarely look beyond the star rating and the number of reviews, and even then I take the star rating with a grain of salt. The folksy, storytelling style they seem to have championed makes reading through even a sampling of the top reviews unbearable. It's too bad - I think they could successfully "pivot" (sorry) into everything from location to coupons relatively easily if their community didn't suck.<p>That said, Yelp is already fairly well integrated with the social graph (via Connect) and one of the best use-cases for Yelp is for finding destinations away from your main locale and, presumably, your social graph. I don't think this approach will add value.
I agree with most that reviews are generally prone to abuse. (Although frankly some of the Amazon non-serious reviews are just priceless, like the Cat in the Hat ones [1])<p>I am also surprised Facebook hasn't jumped in here, seems a really useful product would be 'facebook reviews' which linked reviews to profiles. Then 'the set of reviews you trust' could fall right out of your friends list.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Hat-Dr-Seuss/product-reviews/039480001X/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Hat-Dr-Seuss/product-reviews/03948...</a>
As someone who had dabbled in this "social recommendations" space, finding reviews from friends when you do not have a big enough social graph is probably the biggest difficulty. Also, it may work in a place like SF, but outside of those deeply networked places, it becomes difficult to find restaurants with reviews on Yelp, forget finding places where your friends have been to.<p>And remember that people are far more inclined to write reviews when they have had a negative experience, and not a positive one.<p>A tough task. I wish you all the best.
I also find Yelp pretty useless at this point, so I've been hoping to find a site that allows me to easily see the places that my friends (or friends of friends) have been and to see their reviews of those places. Are all reviews on your site going to be public, or is there going to be an option to only show them to your friends and their friends? I'm hoping it's the latter.
Trust? Nobody has ever 'trusted' reviews by other people. They've used them to help make decisions, but 'trust'?<p>I use reviews to find the negatives of something, and then decide if that negative bothers me. Filtering out people with an axe to grind can be an art all in itself, but many people are pretty easy to spot.
why is this the biggest thing we're trying to solve? can't we use these incredibly powerful algorithms to solve a real problem? there are so many restaurant recommenders out or coming soon."You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?"
I really wish there was a professional review company that charged restaurants for the reviews and then made the information public. Zagat's model of charging for the ratings isn't helpful because the reviews are limited to their ecosystem and don't show up in the places I read reviews (seamlessweb, google, etc)<p>Yelp reviews are so astroturfed the ratings are useless.