An exploration of Yelp's own filtered reviews

Interesting article. I don't understand the filtered review system at all. Beyond the 'he said / she said' complaints that occasionally come out, there are things about their system that simply don't make any sense unless Yelp is incompetent or slimy. For example:<p>- When you post a review, you as a reviewer think its unfiltered forever. When you revisit the page as a logged in user and read a place that has your review, your review is visible. When you log out or log in as another user, the review is filtered and hidden. At the very least, it should tell you your review is filtered, I see no reason to pretend the review is not filtered when the review is legitimate.<p>- When you view unfiltered results, the per page number mysteriously changes to 10 per page. I don't see any reason why this should change. Plus the results are pretty slow to load, quite slower than the results for filtered reviews.<p>- Why do you need to enter in a captcha to view the unfiltered reviews? Why would they care if you were a bot only for the unfiltered reviews and not the normal reviews? I don't see the difference, unless they want to prevent people from writing scripts to pull in unfiltered review data. Plus the captcha is fucking horrible, literally half the captcha's I get are not readable and I need to refresh.<p>- The filter algorithm seems to be clearly flawed and simply catches way too many reviews that should not be filtered. For example, take this user: <a href="http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=tZlbsUVo-8wtnR7oMa-3xg" rel="nofollow">http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=tZlbsUVo-8wtnR7oMa-3...</a> . The guy has 11 reviews, 1 1-star review, 1 2-star review and nothing out of the ordinary and yet his review about Yelp was filtered. Why? His points in the review seemed legitimate. He seems to be a normal user, not a new user and posts reviews across the board (more good reviews than bad in fact). They should either fix the algorithm or be more transparent about why reviews are filtered because I can't understand why a review like that is filtered.

"I don't like Yelp, so here are some random unsubstantiated complaints about the reviews about Yelp itself."<p>The author seems to think people hate Yelp, but I'm not sure that's the case. Everyone I know in real life uses it regularly when trying to find some place to go, and the results are largely acceptable.<p>Review sites are always going to trend negative because people who have had average or good experiences aren't going to be driven by rage to write a nasty review. Everyone has their own star scale and expectations of service ("I had to sit in economy class on my $10 ticket! I'm never flying United again!"). This leads to useless star ratings, but this is no fault of Yelp itself. It's the fault of relying on non-professionals to do professional-quality work. But, if you read for content, you can usually figure out whether a place is good or not. For example, a review like "I went during the dinner rush on Saturday night and it took 5 minutes to get a table! 1 star! Oh yeah, the food was good." is a positive review, even though the reviewer only gave one star.<p>So anyway, don't hate on Yelp, hate on the clueless people clueless writing reviews.

Yelp has more information on their web site about the review filter, soliciting reviews, false positives, and more:<p><a href="https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions" rel="nofollow">https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions</a><p>It's easy to jump on the bandwagon and say "Yelp is evil," but having been a near-constant point of controversy, it's something they do their best to address.

Yelp's main defense is "It's done by an algorithm". That's not a valid defense for a bad business practice.<p>They are accused of hiding positive reviews for businesses that don't pay them. You can perfectly well write this logic in Python for an filtering algorithm:<p><pre><code> def filter(review): ... if review.business.contacted_by_sales_count &#62;= 3 and not review.business.paying_yelp and review.stars &#62;= 4 and random() &#62; 0.8: # 80% chance return true # yes, filter it ... </code></pre> Even if it's not written so explicitly they have to take responsibility for their algorithms.

I've posted about 6 reviews in total on yelp, 2 of which were immediately filtered for no reason. Funny how my positive reviews went through just fine and the rest got binned. If you're going to run a review site, at least let people give their honest opinions don't filter anything other then profanity. People should be able to share an experience be it good or bad.

The captcha looked quite clearly to me to be "inctory". These captcha's are not necessarily real words (I believe to thwart dictionary based crackers?), and I also am pretty sure the service they are using is not tied to Yelp itself.

I stopped using Yelp after I discovered that reviews I logged to the site were not showing if I was not "logged in" to Yelp. What is the point of using a social review repository if the reviews are only viewable by me, when I log in to the site? I'd be better served by putting it in a text file/directory.

Organizations like Yelp live and die on their accuracy and predictive ability. If Netflix recommends movies you don't like, you will use it less. If Zagat allows too much personal preference, it will no longer be the gold (Maroon?) standard of crowd sourced restaurant reviews.<p>If half the things suggested about Yelp are true, they risk their integrity at great peril.

so are you saying that yelp is basicly an online extortion business,<p>and judicial system and all the yelp users accept it ..?

I think Yelp has always been a good service but obviously there is a disconnect between the business end of Yelp and the service end. The Chicago Tribune article is not the first to complain about the business practices of Yelp. Additionally, advertising on Yelp is some of the most expensive real estate on the web with CPM rates of $100-$300. Ultimately I think that directory sites such as Yelp will become obsolete as social search becomes more refined and relevant. My company is actually working on this and we thing that we have a good product so far (in alpha). <a href="http://www.cliqsearch.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cliqsearch.com</a>