Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate.
If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street.
And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to try to keep people from talking about it, and the moral interests just get worse and worse.
Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of actually showing my options.
(It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of taste and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like better if they heard about them too.)
Google Maps is terrible for hiding results. I'll use the filter to show restaurants with a 4.5+ star rating, and it hides dozens of places 4.5+ stars while instead showing results 4.0 - 4.4 stars and even some that have no reviews at all. I find the arrogance insulting. You want to see 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants? Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean food restaurants that you'll like instead.
I despise Google Maps for this. I can know that a restaurant exists, zoom in on its block, search 'restaurants' -- nothing. It'll zoom out the map and show other stuff. Worse, I can max my zoom and hunt for it on the map and it will outright show a blank space. Only searching for the restaurant's actual name will bring it up.
But there's not really any alternative. Apple Maps can't show me things because it's missing the entries entirely. Yelp became useless years ago. I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.
Internet search in general has severely declined in 2023. I was trying to figure out the syntax for putting a URL in slack the other day and couldn't find a proper article anywhere in the top 10 results.
I think they are trying to integrate their bard UI into search and it is killing the results.
At this point, I use google to search reddit in order to find organic results. Unfortunately, that will probably be taken over by spammers soon enough.
YouTube is also horrible these days. They made it so for any event or happening, only "official" sources show up so they can add "context" to the narrative. It's dystopian, but possibly worse: annoying. I can't find out what I nees to, when I need to. Thanks Google.
Or they outright silence smaller news organizations that broadcast popular, although controversial, figures who fall under a certain political affiliation.
I'm grateful for places like Rumble and Twitter, where real news can be found. :)
> I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.
Let's face it, that never stopped being the best way. There have always been problems with internet reviews, if only the ones inherent in the 1-5 star mechanism. But, it is very inconvenient to ask around for recommendations when you're (for example) hungry and passing through an unknown town or something. So I get why we need a source that isn't completely unreliable.
Perhaps what's needed is a website that doesn't do reviews, but only lists businesses that are open to the public and categorizes them by function (pharmacy, grocery, daycare, etc). Possibly with direct links to review platforms and official websites and so on, but without actually inserting any content (reviews, ad copy) into the website itself; this can be left to other sites.
I've noticed this in the last 6 months specifically. If I search for grocery stores it only shows me some chains and not others now. If I want to see where Safeway stores are at I have to search Safeway; they won't show up under grocery stores anymore.
I have noticed this too. I wonder if those businesses haven't paid an SEO expert to set up their business properly or if they haven't paid google for their "premium" map features
Organic Maps is very good at showing where 'restaurants' are. It's just not very good at showing their hours or including links to their web site or menu.
Google maps is also terrible at showing _only_ relevant info. I searched for “coffee” in a small area earlier today (small because I wanted to walk); it zoomed out to a much larger area and showed me coffee shops along with taquerias, oil change shops, banks, etc. both in the results pane and scattered all over the map. It was such a mess as to be unusable.
Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results. It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish. Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results including ones for Target and McDonald's.
You're being flagged but you're absolutely correct. Maps search is awful. Yes, most McDonalds might have more than 4 stars, but that's not what I want when I search 'cafe'! I avoid most chain restaurants in general which makes it much worse. I wish there was at least an option to block restaurants from showing up in your results.
on the same topic - sometimes it's so frustrating when I put some shop name in Google Maps while I'm in Paris and looking on the map of my neighborhood, for example - and whoosh - it zooms so far out to show all the places which "suit" the search in all the Europe. Why would it do that?
It's so frustrating to find the perfect restaurant by chance and find it on the map directly when it didn't show up in a very targeted search of the same map.
There's also a lot of brigading on Maps. You'll see 5 1-star reviews in a row, and realize they are either duplicate accounts or friends who are all reviewing the same experience.
Weird thing is I began comparing things like Uber Eats reviews and Google Maps reviews for local Asian restaurants, and I see things in Google Maps are reviewed substantially lower.
For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps restaurants also based on service. One in particular
This place is awesome, and personally have experienced bad service but don't really care, so I do understand the Google Maps rating, but do find the whole rating system not helpful for me as I'm interested in good food and willing to accept bad service.
One theory I have is that you're getting different rating for different experience. Some "Asian" food keeps well, so it could stand out from the competition. They don't have to deal with you being in the restaurant, complaining about the smell, the service, they hit on the waitress and she wasn't very friendly responding, ect.
You're correct. This is a problem with ratings. You really have to read into them to see what they're complaining about or praising. This is true even for individual reviews, written solo. Many are unhelpful, or stuff that doesn't concern you.
One of the best examples I can remember is a venue that had 2-3 stars. However, all the negative reviews were like: "They have massive parties going hard late into the night... but my kids go to bed at 9:30, so 1 star".
> Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean food restaurants that you'll like instead.
If only. Its more like "these are the businesses that have paid me. They don't match what you want, but tough cookies."
Same with the much vaunted Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines. They stopped recommending stuff that you would like a long time ago, around the time everyone was trying to copy their recommendation engines, and started recommending stuff that makes the company more money.
I hesitate to suggest that this may indicate there aren't that many 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants. Even great resaurants in my area struggle to break the 4.5 barrier.
Changing the zoom level will typically show these missing results. For example, I just checked my neighborhood. There are 5 restaurants within a few hundred feet of each other rated 4.5+ stars. With my filters set to 4.5+ stars, when I zoom out a bit, 4 of the 5 restaurants disappear, and I instead see a handful of 4.1 and 4.3 star restaurants. One of the 4.3 star restaurants is literally next door to a 5 star and 4.5 star restaurant, which are hidden at that zoom level.
I thought maybe it's some kind of weighted rating, because it's showing me the 4.3 star restaurant with 1,100 reviews, instead of the 4.5 star restaurant with 600 reviews. So, perhaps Google thinks the additional number of reviews make up for the lower rating, and they rank it higher, even though I'm specifically asking to not see those results. However, it also shows a 4.4 star restaurant with 40 reviews, while hiding a 4.5 star restaurant with 90 reviews.
This is par for the course when it comes to modern recommendations though. Do you want to see Netflix movies released in the past 3 years? Or what about a simple list of top rated movies? Too bad, you can watch what we tell you to watch. It's a complete lack of respect for the user.
It could also be recent ratings; I think it is reasonable to weight old reviews lower than new ones given restaurants can change a lot over the months and years.
Perhaps. But then why not just say “no results found”? Because that might give the impression to the “average” user that Google is broken and isn’t solving their problem. To the more sophisticated user, Google is just meddling where they shouldn’t.
Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to the average.
Google long ago decided that "No results found" is never an acceptable response. Same with regular Google search. It will just choose arbitrary things to show you instead.
It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of these tools.
At least here where I live, Foodora and similar have ruined what was left of the Google ratings for any place offering take-away, because there's ton of 1 star reviews which concerns the transport.
At least viewing the most recent comments and reading the comment that goes with it helps figuring out if it might be a decent place or not... at least sometimes.
It gets worse. People have been 'following' the ratings when they rate foods.
A popular local restaurant came under new management and their food is now atrocious. We actually threw their food in the garbage after getting takeout there a month ago.
Meanwhile, tourists are still leaving thousands of rave reviews on their google maps page. Noticeably, you will see one or two bad reviews every 50 reviews or so, where a person comments about their confusion about the restaurants score.
Yep, a local pub used to give large portion sizes on in person or takeout orders. Then one day we ordered and it was like half the size as normal but of course the same price. Thought it was maybe just a fluke so we gave them a second chance. Unfortunately the portions will still the same smaller size. I proceeded to update my review to indicate the change in portion sizes with the same price. However I noticed many older reviews still indicating large portion sizes as well as even new reviews saying it. Because many new people wouldn't even have the comparison to how it used to be.
So you're getting both new reviewers (or travelers) who don't know it used to be better who still call it good, mixed with old reviews calling it good.
It's not even just a management change that causes this. This is when you almost wish Google maps would put your location history to use. It sees you visit the place frequently and thus if you stop visiting and leave a negative review it should weigh that review higher and give it more visibility. An old stale review or a review from someone who visited once I don't think should be as impactful or useful on the experience.
Overall I find discovering new places to be frustrating as reviews often seem useless. Usually I find the best method of discovering new places is still via word-of-mouth in person.
> This is when you almost wish Google maps would put your location history to use. It sees you visit the place frequently and thus if you stop visiting and leave a negative review it should weigh that review higher and give it more visibility.
But how would that make Google more money, this quarter?
I could imagine an argument that, over a long enough time period, (re)gaining user trust would lead to an increase in ads revenue, but at best that long-term increase goes into the promo packet of the T9 leading "Geo/Commerce" or whatever the product area that contains Maps is these days.
DoorDash shows popular items purchased from restaurants along with ratings for each item, plus some form of recency for purchases like "Ordered recently by 20+ others", even down to the options / toppings selected for an item.
“The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
Read it through again and you'll get it.”
-- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Any information repository eventually comes to face the problem that the phenomena it is describing is no longer the same, for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons.
> Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners,
People must have read a different article than I did. This woman is finding tons of third-parties that are either posting fake positive reviews for money, or extorting businesses by writing bad reviews and offering to reverse them for money. She's looking for people who are trying to scam Yelp, or trying to scam businesses through Yelp.
But HN seems stuck in a narrative (for a decade, not new) that Yelp is some sort of organized crime syndicate, and refuses to budge.
"Picking winners" here doesn't mean Yelp is doing the faking themselves.
I just mean that Yelp has chosen to filter and limit in addition to what I'm actually searching. It might be a conversion thing - if I have one really good match it's easier to decide than if they actually show me all 10.
But it means it's really really important to the business now to be that 1 that doesn't get filtered.
And THAT really increases the market for all these fake-review things.
The article makes it pretty clear that the villian is Yelp (and Google Reviews, and Trustpilot etc). It's no different than any other social media moral hazard: Yelp makes money in spite of their being fraudulent reviews, and won't make the investment in cleaning it up.
> Dean said [Yelp's] notices validate her work, but also perfectly exemplify what she calls Yelp’s “whack-a-mole” approach ... she showed SFGATE several sketchy posts that she hasn’t mentioned in her videos — and which are still up and active.
> “I find it annoying, like, ‘You need me?’” she said. “... They’re a billion-dollar tech company that’s got teams of engineers and a trust and safety team.”
> ... Yelp said its automated recommendation software checked the 21 million reviews submitted last year for “quality, reliability and user activity” and had filed 75% into the “recommended” category, which are the reviews that figure most prominently on businesses’ pages and affect their star ratings. Of the remaining 25%, just 4% were removed by Yelp’s own moderators, 2% were removed by the reviewers themselves, and 19% were categorized as “not recommended reviews” — which don’t affect companies’ star ratings but are still accessible on businesses’ Yelp pages.
> In Dean’s mind, it’s not enough. She feels Yelp should better use account data to proactively identify problematic users and ban them altogether, and speculates that Yelp might be avoiding a crackdown on fake reviews because the positive boosts to businesses’ ratings might increase Yelp’s value to those businesses.
Given that this kind of problem is rampant across social media (where the platform is incentivized to promote horrible things, as we've seen with Meta, Insta, etc etc), it probably should be criminal if we ever want to erase this scourge. As the article shows, _businesses can't opt out from Yelp_ -- which is a pretty horrible state of affairs.
> It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of taste and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like better if they heard about them too.
Instagram doesn't help -- gotta get a shot of me eating noodles at the hot new place! There's a new ramen shop in downtown San Mateo that has a 30-person line outside at all times... I can't imagine it's that much better than the half-dozen other ramen places within 3 blocks, but by god it's new, and anyway would people be lining up like this if it wasn't good? I better get in line too...
Back in my bar-tending days we always told the door staff (bouncers) to slow down when checking IDs early in the evening, just to get a line going. It works surprisingly well for drawing in more customers.
Totally tangential but follow-ups on that psychology:
* some people would walk in and see the still mostly-empty bar and get fed up that they waited in line for "nothing". This was surprisingly few people though.
* some people would ask and buy just about any explanation - "oh that guy is new and still learning", "we had someone get in on a fake ID and got a fine the other day so the guys are just being careful" or whatever and the people would be glad they got in early to get a good spot.
* sometimes we'd slow down the bar staff a bit too so that there was a line to buy drinks and people were happier that they had to wait in line again - confirming their bias that they must have gotten in at the start of the rush.
* some people were wise to the scam and everyone who called us on it thought it was great. They often offered to have their buddies come through the line a few times in exchange for a free drink.
* for some reason when you let your buddies, regulars and off-shift staff cut the line and get in quick, the rest of the folks seemed more willing to wait in the line.
Utterly bizarre, yes. I think the psychological term for this is "social proof", and it applies to all sorts of weird things. For instance -- a person who is getting lots of flirty attention in public will tend to appear more attractive to others. Not because they are, but because seeing them get attention is social proof that they're worthy of attention.
Once I became an old fart, I started seeing these lines as a sign to move on. The question in my mind (at any age) was always "is the place worth waiting in line for?" But these days, I already know from years of experience that the answer is very likely "no".
Skipping the line has improved my nights out, though, because in looking for an alternative, I frequently find hidden gems and can enjoy them before the rest of the city discovers them.
This has been a process for me. I still occasionally succumb to the silliness, but for the most part when I see a line, my reaction is, "meh, I'm hungry/thirsty now; let's go somewhere else". One thing that's telling is that some of the places I already know I really enjoy rarely have lines or are completely busy.
And absolutely agree that you often find hidden gems that way. A lack of a line will often just mean the business is too inexperienced or honest to use some of the psychological manipulation practices the GP talks about.
I recently went to a dessert shop in Palo Alto that seemed to be rate-limiting their orders so they could get a crowd formed. Once there were 2-3 people waiting, the line would invariably blossom to 5-10, and then stay high for a while. I can't be sure it was on purpose, but the thought definitely crossed my mind...
I know which place you're talking about, and their stuff is actually sort of unique to me at least, in the sense that there's no broth in any of the ramen, but more of an oily sauce that you mix with the noodles. It's actually really amazing, and worth at least some wait to me. (and a Japanese opening a bay area branch tends to form lines).
This is why Craigslist does great. They take a small fixed fee on volume and don't favor listings.
A good restaurant directory - some exist for restaurant niches, but none in general - could clean up with non-obtrusive ads if the focused on completeness and accuracy with a fairly minor feature set. It would just require having enough capital and time to establish social trust.
Curating reviews is just broken, just like SEO has turned out to be. It is unavoidably gameable. Yelp seems like a zombie site. They are free-riding on their prior reputation and gradually spending it away to acquire revenue. When the reputation is gone, the revenue will be, also.
Founded pre-internet. Curated reviews behind a paywall :. clear incentives for quality. A quick glance over wikipedia gives the gist. In my lifetime Zagat-rated was a mark of honor particularly for mid to high-end restaurants.
I'm always amazed when I search for any generic term on Google Maps at how many places I know about don't show up in search results. What a shame. They clearly ran out of new ideas years ago.
First time I used OpenTable I went to a highly rated and expensive place, had horrible food, and then my wife spent most of mothers day in bed with food poisoning. 0/10.
If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street.
And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to try to keep people from talking about it, and the moral interests just get worse and worse.
Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of actually showing my options.
(It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of taste and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like better if they heard about them too.)