A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

Yelp has really let me down. I'm new to San Francisco, and initially used Yelp to help me figure out where to eat and hang out. Over time I learned that some of its 4.5 star places are dirty Taquerias that really suck, and some of my favorite places to be are poorly rated. (Note: I've got nothing against dirty taquerias, but the food better be good if it's a dirty run down taqueria with 5 stars.) I'm not sure what services are better than Yelp.<p>I've heard people say in casual conversation that Yelp is "over" and all the people in the know have gone elsewhere. What services should I be using to know where the best places to eat are in San Francisco and Marin?<p>Sol Food in Marin county, for example, is just worshiped on Yelp with 5 star reviews. But I go there, I wait in line for 30 minutes, get crammed in on a bench with 5 strangers, and get served a steak sandwich that's too tough to chew. What's up with that? I feel like I'm better off using Google Maps and just guessing than looking to Yelp for advice. Anyway, are there better services than Yelp to help me figure out what's actually worth going to?

A single helpful Yelp review lays out what happened with this establishment: <i>It ain't what is used to be. They've moved from North Beach to a new location closer to Fisherman Wharf. They probably get alot of tourists. The food is okay...but not as delicious as it was when the other "Italian" owners had it. Where are the Italian waiters who brought so much harm and courtesy to their customers.</i><p>Instead of acknowledging these changes as the source of discontent, he blames customers and the review site for pointing issues out. Instead of penning op-eds he should be training his staff, buying higher quality ingredients, and listening to customer complaints.<p>Owners who hate Yelp ignore the near real time feedback they would never get in person. Complaints posted Fri - Sun more often than Mon - Thur: maybe it you need to look at who works what shifts? Calamari rubbery: Did someone properly train the line cooks? Food called bland, mediocre, bad, or unremarkable: Maybe you should go back to the higher quality ingredients you decided to skimp on to "make more money"?<p>Yelp looks to be a great way to avoid the death spiral restaurants commonly find themselves in.<p>Not making enough money? Buy lower quality ingredients. Still not making enough money? Raise prices. Repeat until you lose all regular business and rely on unsuspecting first timers who begrudgingly pay and never return. Eventually close it down.

Consumer Reports was way ahead of their time.<p>Any site that accepts advertising is automatically tainted. (CR never takes advertising.) Yelp wants its reviews to be believed and for establishments to pay for advertising.<p>Maybe they're good at balancing the two, but when it comes time to close the quarterly report, you know which one is going to win out.

I've been a Yelp user for years, and I was even an "Elite User" for awhile...and I had never heard of "filtered reviews" until now. In fact, if you go to the page of the OP's business, once you actually find the "Filtered Reviews" link (which is in very light gray), clicking on it brings a CAPTCHA...<p><a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco" rel="nofollow">http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco</a><p>What the hell??<p>Even as a user determined to see what the fuss is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. So I'm guessing <i></i>nobody<i></i> actually clicks through to the filtered reviews, whatever they actually are.<p>I love that Yelp helps me find interesting places in a dense area like NYC, but their business model is appalling.

Yelp is fundamentally flawed.<p>Firstly, they have a clear conflict of interest, which has been discussed many times, when it comes to selling advertising. Buying advertising (anecdotally) seems to make bad reviews magically disappear.<p>Secondly, and this has always been the problem with "local", is you need a certain critical mass for it to be usable. You can argue that Yelp has reached this point in many cases (although see the next two points) but there are many businesses with &#60;5 reviews.<p>Third, there is too much friction in asking people to review (and even rate things). Most people simply don't and probably never will. This exacerbates the "critical mass" problem but also introduces a selection bias. The people who comment and rate aren't necessarily representative of general opinions or you (the personalization problem).<p>I've gone to eat at some places in NYC that are 3.5+ stars that have varied from average to terrible. In some cases I've gone with someone who shared this positive review but--and I realize the counterargument to this is that it's subjective--they're just <i>wrong</i>.<p>Fourth, there is a clear fraud problem with reviews and ratings. People are clearly paid to give positive reviews (eg you see someone rate a given car dealership in the Bay area on one day and then another in Maine the next day and so on). Of any of the companies in "local", IMHO Google is in the best position to deal with this particular problem (disclaimer: I work for Google).<p>Lastly, as such reviews become increasingly important, there is the issue of extortion. If this hasn't happened already it will. Criminals already target websites with DDoS attacks that go away if the site in question pays what amounts to "protection money". There's nothing really to stop such criminal enterprises shaking down businesses with the threat of a bad slew of reviews.<p>It's worth making extra mention of personalization. Many (Google included) seem to view "social search" and "social recommendations" as some kind of panacea to some or even all of these problems. I disagree. I know a couple of people who, say, like Adam Sandler movies. I do not. Not even remotely. Their movie recommendations are so diametrically opposed to mine that I can pretty much take the opposite of what they recommend.<p>The way forward with this will be something like the Netflix model (IMHO) where these great data mining systems will attempt to find people who are like me and have similar tastes whose recommendations will likely coincide with mine.

This issue comes up quite a bit. Since OwnLocal works with a number of small businesses, we've heard many so-called "horror" stories.<p>What it boils down to is Yelp filters positive reviews for effusiveness (and ALL CAPS), personal connections with the business owner or employees, rapid review acceleration from first-time Yelp users, or users from the same IP address.<p>What this article doesn't mention is that many small business owners understand how important Yelp is and actively try to game the system in blatant and unsophisticated ways. Their friends write five star reviews about how wonderful the owner is and how they always have their anniversary dinner there. They create multiple fake accounts and complain loudly that their positive reviews have been filtered.<p>We've also noticed a certain tone businesses and their friends use. They don't typically describe a particular experience, they describe a business in generalities and will often refer back to what other reviewers are saying. They also appear to take what other people think very personally.<p>The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends.<p>A common looking filtered review (notice effusiveness, caps wording, and referencing other reviews):<p>"This is a NICE restaurant - one that you go to when you want a quiet meal away from the kids - it's definitely not family-oriented, but then again, not every restaurant needs to be. If you're used to Olive Garden as your Italian "go-to place", then you will probably be disappointed in Fior d'Italia. If you want REAL Italian food, then ignore the naysayers and come here."<p>Yelp itself has rough stats for the breakdown of reviews:<p>5 stars: 38% 4 stars: 29% 3 stars: 14% 2 stars: 8% 1 star: 11%<p>Yelp's little secret is actually that the star ratings don't provide very much granularity for the casual review reader to make a decision and that most restaurants average out to ~3.75 or in Yelp parlance ~3.5 - 4 stars.

One of the problems with Yelp in my city is the "Yelp elite". To bootstrap in my city, Yelp hired a community manager (part of their job is also writing reviews), and enlisted a bunch of people to become "Yelp Elite", earning access to parties in exchange for posting (it seems) daily reviews.<p>The result has been a high quantity of lengthy, some-times entertaining, low-information reviews posted by people whose advice I wouldn't likely take if I met them in person.<p><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_business/t/yelps-elite-epicurean-force-totally-free-labor/#.T1fFD5H5wng" rel="nofollow">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_busin...</a>

I disagree with all of his points. You shouldn't be able to opt out; if I want to post a review of your business on the Internet, that's my decision to make, not yours. (What's next, politicians opting out of news coverage? Yeah right.)<p>Review filtering is similar; Yelp is allowed to express editorial oversight over their website. Specifically, they try to reduce fraud. Your credit card company doesn't discuss their fraud detection algorithms, so why should Yelp?<p>All I see here is, "I like my own restaurant, but other people don't. Shut down the review site so nobody can tell anyone else!"

The lack of transparency isn't surprising to me, as that's basically industry practice when it comes to the "special sauce" algorithms that power these recommendation engines (google, tripadvisor, whoever).<p>But the extortion part does surprise (horrify?) me. I'd love to see some more concrete proof that advertising on yelp results in a friendlier filter function for that business. I assume that there is enough publicly available information (just by scraping their site) to establish some kind of correlation between advertising and filter-friendliness, if one exists. Any of you up for the challenge?<p>I'd settle for seeing those communications w/the sales team referenced in the article, though.

I think his worry for the investors is misplaced - the BBB has been running a similar racket for years and seems to be doing just fine.

Interesting view from the restauranteur. I don't think Yelp would be wise to use his advice directly, though. Allowing businesses to opt out of Yelp would be a terrible idea, because Yelp is much more useful when it has everything. Also, there is doubtless a substantial amount of attempted gaming with the reviews, so attempting to catch this and filtering it out is very important if Yelp is to maintain a reputation of being a trustworthy source of reviews. They should try to reduce false positives, but saying they shouldn't filter anything is silly.<p>The implications of only being able to help the restauranteur with his bad reviews for money are really terrible, though. I wonder if they still do this after all the bad press surrounding that a while back.

So... I <i>might</i> be a bit biased (co-founder at Fondu <a href="http://fondu.com" rel="nofollow">http://fondu.com</a>), but this really is a major problem.<p>Most restaurant owners we've talked to are afraid of Yelp and the power that it wields. From an investor standpoint it does a great job monetizing it's community. The problem is that Yelp essentially weights the scales, depending upon who is paying them ad money.<p>Whereas Google did a great job by separating church and state (search and ads), Yelp happily blends the two together. The end result is a little bit of fact and a little bit of fiction.<p>YMMV, but we think discovering through trusted friends rather than group averages is how the future looks.

I cannot believe the coincidence! My father owns a small pizza business (small as in 1 store, 22 years) and yesterday a yelp power user got upset because I didn't give her free jalepenos. She knew we charge extra for things like ranch but still expected jalepenos for free. She got so mad she changed her review and said there was a "hair" in her pizza "months ago." She is obviously saying this to damage us because she was treated the same as all customers and expects special treatment. Extortion? That's how it felt but I don't care because our true customers know better and are great people. See the whole thing here: <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine" rel="nofollow">http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine</a>. Sort by date, most recent review.<p>This was yelps response when I reported this user: Hi there,<p>Thank you for inquiring about the reviews of Ray's Pizza on Yelp.<p>We've looked at Jayne L's review, and since it appears to reflect the personal experience and opinions of the reviewer, we are leaving it intact. Unfortunately, we don't take sides on factual disputes, and suggest instead that you contact the reviewer again to clarify any misunderstandings.<p>We think it's important for businesses to be part of the conversation, and have created a suite of free tools to help business owners get the most out of Yelp. It looks like you've already unlocked your business page. As a reminder, you can: - Communicate with your customers via private message or public comment - Track how many people view your business page - Add photos and a detailed description of your business - Convert Yelp users into customers by posting a Yelp Deal to your listing You can login to your account here: <a href="https://biz.yelp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://biz.yelp.com/</a><p>Regards, Summer Yelp User Support San Francisco, California<p>I am a yelp user and it was great but for businesses its getting out of hand when there is no transparency. What if people are paid to yelp a lot and then use their influence to sell reviews? It could happen.

I'm really looking forward to the day that this 'business practice' of Yelp's comes to a broader audience.<p>While I agree that you can say this is a business model, I can't agree that it is morally correct in anyway, even in a world of capitalism.

Nobody gives a crap that the restaurant has been there 125 years, but that's what the owner leads with in defense of his enterprise. Looking at the reviews for Fior d' Italia, it looks like service leaves quite a bit to be desired and the food isn't that good.<p>Maybe Yelp is polluted and biased...or maybe Fior d' Italia just sucks. Occam's razor says it's the latter.<p>My wife and I travel all over the country on business, often finding ourselves in cities where we've never been. Yelp finds us a great place to eat <i>every single time</i>.

I found this response elsewhere in the thread so interesting that I had to say something.<p><i>PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :(</i><p>If you're trying to keep a taqueria to yourself, do you have incentive to leave a bad review? After all, your interests are not aligned with the rest of Yelp's customers. Or even, necessarily aligned with the taqueria's success. Maybe it's to your codependent advantage that they always stay small and delicious and hidden and yours...<p>preciouss.<p>This is the problem Yelp hasn't solved yet: how to align the interests of Yelp, Yelp reviewers, Yelp readers, and restaurants. Yelp succeeds if reviewers leave bad reviews because they are upselling bad review protection (they say they aren't several times in the FAQ, but they protesteth too much for me), or if restaurants buy ads. Yelp readers succeed if reviewers are honest and they can use reviews to optimize their personal quality/dollar equation. Restaurants succeed if Yelp drives Yelp readers to them, if reviewers leave good reviews.<p>Reviewers have many incentives to game reviews. One of the Yelp FAQs is about payola. If they review enough they gain community prominence through badges/titles. If they review too much, their reviews look suspicious (because they could be making them up instead of actually attending). If they become untrustworthy due to a secret Yelp algorithm, their reviews are obscured from prominent view. If they have a bad experience at a place everyone thinks is great, they run a risk writing a contrarian review and being labeled untrustworthy. And on and on.

I've never used Yelp, beyond stumbling on the site when looking for restaurant reviews through Google. But as a follower of technology news, I <i>have</i> read much about it and its controversies. Add this one to the pile. It definitely calls into question their slogan, "Real People. Real Reviews."<p>But even if the controversies are unfounded...$1.5BB blows my &#38;!%#ing mind. My personal perception is that I'm not even sure I trust the reviews.

I lived in roughly the same place for the last 20 years, so yelp is very interesting to me. I often notice poor ratings where I believe high ratings are deserved, but also low ratings where high ratings are deserved.

I have a product in the local restaurant space. As a result I talk to lots of restaurant people - staff, primarily. It is overwhelming the vitriol I hear from them toward Yelp. Many people downright despise it.

As a business owner, I have also seen the extortion for advertising model. Businesses that advertise with Yelp have low star reviews filtered, while businesses like mine that do not, have reviews from valid customers (often with friends and other reviews) filtered, to lower star ratings.<p>I have also seen reviews that are blatantly fake (e.g. reviews from Santa Claus, comical reviews, etc.) persist, until a significant amount of time passes. This indicates manual removal, and no actual Yelp filter.

Filtering legitimate reviews is a big problem. Once I discovered that Yelp filtered most of my reviews, I stopped writing them. It's not even like I'm some anonymous coward (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course): I have had a photo of myself on Yelp for a long time, my account is linked to a few friends of mine on Yelp, and I even went to a Yelp event. I wonder how many other people like me stopped writing reviews for the same reason?

Yelp really is the cool-startup version of the Better Business Bureau.

I think this makes sense. Filtered reviews are reviews that yelp considers to be fraudulent. They may be reviews created by multiple accounts from the same computer to inflate a restaurant's rating. Or they may all be negative reviews created by one person with multiple accounts to try to hurt a business they weren't happy with. Either way, I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a system of filtering should and does exist.<p>Now maybe their filtering system is so horrendous that it makes a 4-star restaurant seem like a 2.5 star restaurant, but I find this hard to believe.<p>As for asking people to advertise with them to make "bad reviews disappear", that would be terrible, so I can't speak to that, since all we have to go on is this particular owner's word vs Yelp's. Is there any proof of this happening?

When I want to find a good place to eat, first I 1. ask somebody where a good place is and what they liked that they ate 2. figure out what kind of food i want and look for the best rated places near me 3. compare the menu with what i know about the cuisine, pictures of the place and any details i can scrounge up 4. then I just go and try to pick something I think i'll like.<p>Food isn't rocket science. Good places are open for a while and have lots of people and you avoid chains and franchises. Don't complain about the service, nobody cares. Don't complain about the prices, nobody cares. Don't complain about the clientele or the ambiance, nobody cares. It's about the food, stupid.

This is not the first time this has come up on HN:<p><a href="http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&#38;q=yelp+extortion&#38;sortby=create_ts+desc&#38;start=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&#38;q=yel...</a>

Funny story. I recently was going to order out from a Chinese restaurant that I had recently ordered from before and recall enjoying. I had to google the number, and in so doing came up with a couple terrible Yelp reviews. For some reason I decided to listen to the toobz instead of relying on my own judgement. Ended up ordering horrible greasy food from a better-rated, well-known jaunt.<p>TL; DR: I let Yelp override my own experience, what's up with that?

I wish the article headline had said that the piece was by a restauranteur. Most of what they have to say about Yelp falls under the heading of "more of the same."<p>I think that restaurant and venue owners are <i>wrong</i> to hate Yelp - but it's understandable that they do. The reasons that they do are interesting. My take on it is that Yelp is disruptive to a lot of the traditional restaurant practices. Restaurant owners resent Yelp because it feels like they're adding more work to what is already a job that requires 80-hour weeks. Previously, restaurant owners had more message control about their venue's location, because social information like "is the Foo Pizzeria any good?" had more friction, it spread more slowly, and it degraded over time.<p>A Yelp review has low friction because it gets automatically ingested into Yelp's data set, it spreads quickly, and it doesn't degrade over time - it stays around on the site. If you're a business with a small number of reviews, it doesn't take many one-stars to make you look unappealing, and Yelp's attempts to be user-friendly mean that you're presented among a crowd of your competitors unless you earn a clickthrough. Like being on a crowded shelf at the supermarket, you're at the mercy of the visitor.<p>One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is "Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what <i>I do,</i> not to what a stranger on the Internet <i>inflicts</i> on me?" That's a reasonable objection - and that's why Yelp has invested a shit-ton of engineer-hours into filtering reviews. Filtering reviews is something that benefits both restauranteurs and users - it's just that the former tend to be ungrateful pricks about it because "filtering" includes "removing algorithmically detectable friends-and-family five-star reviews." Which leads to the other big interpretation - that restauranteurs are reacting badly to their customers' newfound ability to hold them accountable. We humans are dumb monkeys with a truckload of cognitive biases: we <i>hate</i> being held accountable. I look at articles like this one and I see big parallels to other whiny people who suddenly are brought into accountability and are resisting it.<p>The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry, <i>cannot</i> win this one in the long term (at least not on the terms that they now use to define "winning"). There's no way to keep people from talking about your business. There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy. There's no way to keep people from taking the easy way - "I feel like pizza, I'll look it up on Yelp" - instead of a harder way - "I feel like pizza, let's see which of my friends knows where the pizzerias are around here, which of them are available, what their phone numbers and/or locations are, or I know, I could go get the huge inconvenient yellow pages and make a choice based on how much they spent on advertising!" Computing devices will get more convenient to use, not less, knowledge will get easier to share, not less, and the cost of querying the Internet's collective opinion will be cheaper, not more expensive. The restaurant and venue owners are never, ever going to win this the way they want to - again like the MPAA and newspapers, the cat is entirely out of the bag.<p>Basically what I think they should do about it is<p>* Stop whining<p>* Read Seth Godin<p>* Compete instead of sue<p>As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few mental filters.<p>* Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews<p>* Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews<p>* Assume that anything at 3.5 stars or above is Good Enough, and use other sources when you want to have rarefied tastes catered to (Yelp started out as being mostly for foodies - I think it's moved out of that, and that if you are or desire to become a serious foodie, you should release yourself from caring about Yelp)

I first read about Yelp's extortion practices in 2009 [1]. I thought that now they have grown so big, the extortion would have stopped. Apparently not :(<p>[1] <a href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635" rel="nofollow">http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e...</a>

Mr. Larive is spot on in his opinion, and I think he offers good solutions to the dilemmas of business response and participation.<p>Yelp is representative of a fundamental problem with so many review sites, and our society at large -- namely that it attempts to coalesce many dimensions of data (a person) into a single score.<p>And, just like FICO, and the SAT/LSAT/etc, Yelp and its predecessors (BBB) attempt to do the same for businesses.<p>Worse still, they rely on the "Wisdom of Crowds" when it comes to qualitative measure and taste. An average 2.5 stars tells me nothing, especially because I'm an elitist prick and think the average Yelp commenter is an idiot.<p>I fear that people substitute a Yelp rating for their own critical-thinking, and that is wrong. It is just as wrong that schools judge students largely based on a single test score. It is wrong that lending happens based on a opaque algorithm.<p>I fear that Yelp is just another symptom that our society is sick. Our brains have atrophied to the point where we only look for one number that determines the succes or failure of our education, our lives and our livelihood.<p>Or is that a touch melodramatic?

Shameless plug:<p>We just launched Chewsy (<a href="http://chewsy.com" rel="nofollow">http://chewsy.com</a>) last year after years of frustration with these aggregate business review sites. We're focused on rating what you ate and sharing recommendations with friends. It's similar to other food apps on the market but different in significant ways. For example, it's not like a vertical instagram like some of those other popular food apps.<p>We're very much in growth mode, but San Francisco is getting some good traction and our hometown of Seattle is thriving.<p>I encourage you to try it out and perhaps it can help you find your next best meal (and help you recommend something to your friends).

Even though the article mentioned restaurants specifically, I believe the point about Yelp being fundamentally flawed extends much beyond food.<p>I have heard similar reports from doctors saying that Yelp is filtering out their 5 star reviews unless they advertise with them.

This is my rule for Yelp:<p>1. Listen to bad reviews. 2. Ignore good reviews.

I find that the star rating of places/reviews in Google maps in Android is more reliable. Presumably, it does not suffer from the extortion bias either.

Yelp apparently does what the BBB does: Extort people by offering "brand cleanup" in exchange for advertising dollars. A disgusting business practice, and I'm sure to pass this along to my "social network".