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?

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?

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking over ideas of where to eat with friends. It doesn't mean that I'm living my life wrong.

But let's just say for sake of argument that it's best to always be random and spontaneous. Tonight, you should randomly pick a channel on TV, and watch it. Or randomly select a movie. Maybe you don't watch TV or movies. Then a random book off the library shelf?

I do in general terms like your suggestion about being spontaneous, and living in the moment, and embracing chaos and randomness. And here's a suggestion for you: don't tell other people how to live; it's unseemly.

It's a nice suggestion, to live in the moment and be spontaneous, but it's highly impractical. Sometimes it makes sense to work with more information when it's available. Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse? Sometimes it makes sense to be discerning with limited resources. I'm as zen as the next guy, and live in the moment. I just got to this town, and I'd like to start my search with what people think are the most awesome places to eat. Is that so wrong?

It's surely not as wrong as you guys thinking I'm conducting my life improperly for wanting information about where cool places to eat are.

You seem to be overreacting. Suggesting is very different from telling.

Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse?

I think you are conferring a level of undue gravitas to food. Can you really equate selecting where to have lunch with whom to wed?

You can spot a place with a local cliental by the way they interact. If all the tables look like circled wagons fending off marauders, they are tourists. If everyone is well dressed, it's a trendy place with good marketing - people go their once to impress their friends, but don't come back. Expect pretentious overpriced food, if that's what you are looking for.

If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business. While you can't guarantee you'll like it, some people do.

If you're visiting a new place (presumably the typical use case for Yelp), how can you possibly look inside a restaurant and know if the people inside are repeat customers?

>If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business

Oh. So when travelling, you recommend selecting restaurants by looking inside each establishment and inspecting the clothing of the customers? By that argument, how could any restaurant beat (eg) McDonald's, with its casually-dressed, repeat customers?

You can tell by the look of the place that it's not a high end restaurant or a locally run restaurant. That should let you set your expectation for the place.

HN works best when downvoting is not used as disagreement. If you don't like McDonalds, fine. But it's clearly true that many people do.

Now the fries and Coke aren't doing much for you.

This, I think, is the future of crowdsourced review sites. Not necessarily "friends", but at least people with some form of shared experience and mutual interest - and a track record of being honest about what's good and what isn't.

I want the ability to look at a reviewers history, and increase the weighting of reviewers who's reviews I agree with, and to mark as irrelevant the ratings of people who (in my opinion) clearly have no clue about what they're reviewing (or who are obvious shills).

I suspect this could be built on top of Yelp - automatically collate lists of reviewers who's reviews of places we have in common align, and allow me to browse other places they've rated highly (or rated low). I'm guessing doing that as a non-yelp service would be against their TOS, and I'm guessing their business model of "Sorry, we can't 'help' you with negative reviews… Unless of course you choose to become an advertiser?" type extortion would be far less effective if there was a good way to show those poor reviews up as the rantings of the delusional disgruntled that they so often are…

(Of course, if someone were to give me exactly what I'm asking for, I suspect I'd end up with a sanitised subset of "stuff I already know I like" with very little opportunity to discover interesting new things…)

If you see someone whose reviews you like, you can follow them. This will cause their reviews to be at the top of any other businesses you look at. Also, you can click on the name of a person whose review you trust to see a list of other places they reviewed.

I think the only things they are missing from what you suggested (just from what I saw in the FAQ) is personalizing the average rating and aggregating information about the people you trust for you.

If you want to try to implement something like this (perhaps as a browser extension), their APIs look pretty thorough. (http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/business)

Also, the OP said he just moved, so that's probably why he can't just ask friends. Also, even once firmly established in a given region, not everyone has friends in their specific neighborhood, or a given neighborhood they might find themselves in with a rumbling tummy.

Maybe someone can steal that idea and apply it to restaurants.

If there's somebody on your review site, who ranks highly several of my highly ranked coffee shops, and ranks low a subset of my lowly ranked coffee shops, I'd be much more prepared to consider their other coffee shop reviews as relevant to me. Even better, location based services like 4Square of Facebook checkins could expose their "revealed preferences" to the algorithm as well, someone who rates Fourbarrel and Ritual highly, but checks in to Starbucks four times a day is less likely to be someone who's reviews I'd want to read than someone who perhaps rates Fourbarrel and Ritual lower on an absolute scale, but checks into both regularly as well as, say Sightglass and BlueBottle.

I'd really like a time and event aware as well as just venue aware review function. Zeitgeist on a Thursday night, or after a critical mass ride - is a _vastly_ different experience than Zeitgeist on a sunny Saturday afternoon when it's full of slumming sunset and marina crowds. DNA Lounge really needs separate review categories for Death Guild nights, Bootie nights, and out-of-town dubstep artist nights - people who love (and hence rate highly) one of those events are significantly less likely to enjoy the other two as much - which makes a Yelp-style single rating for DNA Lounge not particularly useful.

Another problem is that if your taste is not really mainstream, you have to rate quite a few movies to get accurate predictions. After I reached a couple of hundred movies, the predictions were nearly always completely accurate.

Tripadvisor et al have the advantage that, with all the Internet posting (admittedly with dubious quality, but...), they can show a review of almost anything.

Within my social circle? They won't even be 10% comprehensive for my own town, let alone once I start going away.

Nice idea, won't work.

What counts as a personal link, anyway? There are people on my Facebook profile I knew years ago in a different town, people on my LinkedIn profile I worked with 6-7 years ago. All people with whom I'm happy to stay in contact at a low level and retain in my wider professional network, but would I want to trust a recommendation from a similarly distant contact of theirs as much as I would a day-to-day colleague of my brother-in-law who I see every week? Probably not.

Like I said - nice idea, won't work.

No it's not. I don't understand why so many people are reacting with philosophical criticism to a comment about specific problems with Yelp, in a discussion about that very issue.

Wandering around and finding new places and experiences can be great, but it's not for everyone, and it's certainly not for everyone all the time. There are people who really don't like being "surprised", pleasantly or otherwise. It's not a failing on their part, it's just how they're wired. Services like Yelp are (ostensibly) great for these types of folks, since it allows them to try new things with a little bit of reassurance that if the new thing sucks, it shouldn't suck too bad.

For, say, your tenth wedding anniversary, would you really just show up at the train station with your spouse and your low expectations, hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your randomly-chosen destination?

You are absolutely right, though, my advice is not for everyone, nor all situations. I actually think I am wired a bit wrong, for instance I spent three days in and out of a hospital in Wulumuqi, and I have fond memories of the event, even though at the time it must have been miserable. All I can remember are the cute nurses, the funny glass IV bottles, the $35 CAT scan, and how surprisingly good the hospital was in the farthest place in the world from an ocean.

Part of the problem with something like yelp is that there's no way to gatekeep the genuine and false reviews. Netflix or Amazon, for example, know what you actually paid for. Yelp's got no way to know if you really dined at the restaurant or whether you just know the owner.

Don't they have "Yelp offers"? When you redeem one of these, it's probably because you ate at the restaurant. With the right software, they could even figure out what food you ate, who your server was, and if you tipped well.

Regrets is a bit of a strong word, no? If I walk past a nifty looking sandwich shop and pop in for a meal, and it turns out to be sub-par, is that really a regret?

I'm with jcampbell - if you are inclined to experience significant regret/remorse over having a meal that wasn't too great, it may be time to re-evaluate.

It's not as though I'm saying people are having long dark nights of the soul over a poorly-made salad. But they still feel regret because it's easy to imagine what they might have had.

People will do a lot to avoid even minor regrets. Do you have a favourite restaurant? Do you have a favourite dish at that favourite restaurant? Do you ever feel even slightly reluctant to try a complete new dish at a completely new restaurant? Why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_heuristic

Exploring new restaurants is fun, but also potentially risky and typically needs to be moderated with some degree of caution and preparation.

I recall seeing 5-stars for a sushi restaurant on Yelp, and after an incredibly disappointing meal, I went back to the site and read the reviews. They were all along the lines of "Sushi for under $4! Awesome!." I don't care if it's 4$. If it's bad sushi, it doesn't matter if it's free. I'd rather eat something else. Or maybe the food is great but the service sucks. By conflating all of these categories into a single rating, you end up with ratings that aren't very useful to a lot of people.

No doubt, personalized ratings are the way to go in the future - but none of the apps I've seen (Ness included) seem to do a very good job of this yet.

A Facebook review site where I got reviews just from my friends (or domain experts, ideally also selected by my friends). Right now, Quora and Foursquare seem to be the way to use "friend networks" to find stuff, and then domain-specific sites like chow (for foodies), wis (for watches), etc. too.

I agree with another poster who recommended Chowhound--again if you're willing to spend some time reading rather than just looking for a quick 2 or 3 restaurants to choose from.

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 don't use Yelp but I do use Goodreads which is a site that allows people to review books. And I find that the book ratings are somewhat reliable. Maybe it's that people who read books and are willing to rate a book are more thoughtful about the process.

Service and location is one component of the eating experience just as food is. Service and location are ways for similar restaurants to compete against each other.

To call people "service and location whores" speaks to your own condescending attitude that you, ironically, accuse others of.

With that said, in my experience, most places with a decent number of ratings tends to be spot on. The thing is that people need to measure their expectations. If a place is highly rated for cheap sushi or cheap taqueria food, then, obviously, ratings are going to be based primarily on price and less so on decor/food. After all, that is the _value_ that cheap eateries provide.

Yelp features a price indicator ($, $$ or $$$). If one was looking for good, expensive sushi, they could easily search for sushi with $$$. If they found a result where the restaurant had one $, then their expectations should adjust accordingly.

You could have cheap sushi that's very good; similarly, you could have excellent sushi that's quite expensive compared to other types of food, but is still cheap for that level of quality. And a third place could have the same price as the second, but much lower quality. Which should get $ vs $$$?

Furthermore, not all cheap restaurants are cheap because they are competing on price. Sometimes they are even run at a loss to sell something else. For example, El Bulli, when it was still in operation, was an expensive restaurant on an absolute basis; but relative to the quality of the food, it was very cheap - because it was not even profitable, the restaurant was run at a loss. Instead, it built a brand around Ferran Adrià that sold books and other things.

Similarly, a local restaurant to me is called Corner Room in Bethnal Green, London. It's cheap food selected from a set menu - and rather than controlling demand with prices, it does it with timing and willingness to wait, since bookings are not taken. The same chef runs a much more expensive restaurant, Viajante.

The value of ratings is only as good as the preference function of the raters. If the raters are drawn randomly, then sure, you can probably rely on the rough consensus. But raters are seldom drawn randomly; for one thing, people are much likely to rate bad experiences than good; people with iPhones and who are generally more plugged in are more likely to rate, and there are demographic and geographic patterns to the popularity of various different rating systems.

Using Yelp in an area where all the locals use a different system, you'll end up with ratings from tourists, who may be bowled over by the novelty of sub-par local food. If your own preference function has a primarily foodie basis, but the website you take reviews from has a more balanced function of location, service and price, then it stands to reason that many places will get much higher ratings than you would rate it yourself, because you assign lower weights to those other factors.

If, as you state, you find ratings are a good match to your own preferences, all that means is that you have a preference function somewhere in the middle of the rating sample. But not everyone is like that.

We once again land up with the situation where Chipotle routinely outranks Michelin rated restaurants.

A better method might be bilateral context-aware ratings, e.g. for a nice dinner would you rather go to X or Y? Troublesome for a start-up due to the amplified network effect, but tenable for a site with an established user base.

On the flip side, ratings are not absolute -- when I'm reading reviews of a take-out burrito joint, I'm not looking for an 8 course meal, and it's possible that the local chipotle really is 5 stars among available burrito joints. My expectations of Per Se are really high, so maybe if I go there and get a meal that's 'only' awesome, it gets 4 stars, without that being inconsistent.

Perhaps better filtering could be done by taking price more into account, or asking users to 'class' a restaurant? (Take out, family, sit-down, gourmet, etc)

Never really got Yelp. Taste in food is too subjective to bother with aggregate data.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ness-dining-guide/id454869181...

I work for Foursquare, so I'm obviously biased, but I think Foursquare Explore is a great way to find good places to eat.

https://foursquare.com/explore

Our recommendations are based on 30 million tips (short recommendations, <= 200 characters) left by our users all over the world. They also take into account the popularity of the venue, the likelihood of people leaving tips there, the time of day, the day of week, and many other factors.

If you have a check-in history with foursquare, or if you have friends that use foursquare, we'll make personalized recommendations. We'll recommend things we think you'll like based on your check-in history and your friend's check-in histories, and we'll highlight which of your friends have been to the places we're recommending, and how often.

The product isn't perfect yet, and there are definitely some big deficiencies if you try to use it as a Yelp replacement (notably, foursquare lacks: hours, webpage links, whether they deliver or not, etc). But it's constantly improving, and it's already pretty good.

</shameless plug>

There are a couple of reasons we might have recommended that Chilli's. Have any of your foursquare friends checked in there? That's a pretty strong signal for us, so that might be why it's showing up so highly. If not, it might be that a lot of people check in to that Chilli's.

That said, there's probably more we can do to detect chain restaurants and either boost them or bury them based on your personal likelihood of visiting chain restaurants. Unfortunately, all our ranking code currently works at the level of individual venues, so there's work for us yet on knowing that the venue is part of a chain and ranking accordingly.

I suspect your local Starbucks has two orders of magnitude more checkins that the local specialty coffee roaster/espresso bar…

Just for kicks I tried San Francisco since Yelp did such a terrible job with recommendations when I was there last time. Sure enough I got a host recommendations that I would consider trying next time I'm out there.

I think for this to be better you could tweak the relevancy based on different psychographic profiles. For example maybe show different results for a foodie, family, and maybe a "safe mode" for out-of-towners which would display a mix of results from the prior two.

I don't really use recommendation sites/apps, because I've never found any of them to be useful (I find Yelp to be worthless), but I'd actually use this.

I totally didn't even know that was a thing in Foursquare. I use Foursquare almost exclusively to catalog where I go out to places, so I can remember later when the last time I was there was.

Even if none of your friends have ever written a tip, I've found that seeing that one of my friends has been to restaurant 3 or 4 times is great way to find good places to eat or drink.

Chipotle is becoming much of the same in reviewership. I personally feel there's too much variation in quality from one Chipotle to the next. 

I do agree, Sol Food is not worth the review points it gets. It's confusing for a first time visitor — communal eating isn't something I'm always in the mood for — prices are too high for the quality in my opinion. 

I belive Sol Food gets the bulk of young teens to early twenty somethings that haven't yet really experienced a wide variety of eating establishments. Coming from fast food or the "Ramen Lifestyle" would indeed make one give a place like Sol Food a great review along with that cult following. 

The trouble with Yelp for me is the tally of "x" stars review. That doesn't easily tell you about the place that has excellent food but is a 60 year old dump. Yelp needs to do something to change the way they average the star ratings with price, quality, service, atmosphere, etc.  Do all this on one page, in as little space as possible, and they may hold out for the long haul without being relegated to something like eBay. eBay, Yelp, Pay-Pal... All the lesser of no other evils... Why change?

I personally care most about food quality/taste with service second in importance. The rest doesn't matter to me often, aside from special occasions like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. A preference that allowed simple weighting of their more granular star rating system could be a good start. 

Even with everything fixed, there's been far too many reports of "shady" practices with ratings dependent on whether or not you advertise with Yelp or not for me to personally trust them. 

Someone will come along with bark, chirp, squeal, or hiss soon enough.

Google tried "hotpot," now "places" with personalized recommendations and no pay-to-play scandals but hardly anyone uses it. My recommendations are OK but not great and I suspect the problem is that they don't have enough data to predict well for me.

I hear (from this discussion) that ness does well with personalized recommendations. I have not heard of it before.

Why does everyone use Yelp rather than Google Places or Ness?

And I'll throw in my two cents. I've never used Yelp to find a restaurant. Usually I depend on asking locals in person or I read daily/weekly papers to see what places they write about.

I agree that plenty of Mexican food is not hard to make (specially the kinds of Mexican food I've seen people eat here in the US) if you can get the ingredients, but (1) you can't always get them, and (2) there is also lots of stuff that is complicated or at least very labor intensive to make at home, like mole. (Which I make a point of eating when I go back to visit.)

Although I have to say, I don't really get the whole "missing food" thing: if what you used to like eating isn't readily available in a new place just give up on it and figure out what's good where you are. I'd be pretty surprised by a place that has no good food at all.

Could also explain the lower food quality too since they may either have overworked staff who will make more mistakes or they have had to hire new staff quickly who they did not have time to select or train properly.

I think this is the opposite reason why there are no high-profile craft beer review sites (yes, small sites exist but they're not going public anytime soon). Beer is a luxury, and there's not much in the way of truly disappointing beer to the point where I've ruined 1/3 of my taste experience for the day by consuming it. If you're going to a brewery to try a beer and don't like it, you can get up and walk out a few bucks lighter and travel to another taphouse. You can't easily do that with a meal.

Of course you have to hope they have taste.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/lami-loui...

That's the other problem with this whole thing, I guess. Yelp's content is basicallu 100% subjective.

I'll also note that it's generally a better idea to phone in your order, unless you're eating at a non-peak hour. Alternatively, they have a second storefront on the north side of that block, on 4th St., that generally has fewer people.

Sometimes both me and my wife would just go out and be adventurous a little bit to try new places or new ethnic foods (but of course we normally avoid high-end places for a try-out).

It's a lifestyle thing (that I blog about once in a while) I suppose.

It's not useful if you don't have friends that use it. It's kinda like last.fm: not actually worth using until you're already using it. Some things you have to see to believe in; others you have to believe in to see. Foursquare is the latter, not the former.

For bars and the like, I've had a good experience with Zagat's specialty guides -- e.g., http://www.zagat.com/product/specialty-guides/san-francisco-...

It's likely you'll find a lot of like-minded ppl on foursquare, too.

Okay, so here's the basic idea: you start to vote, "I liked this, I didn't like that, I liked this." This program Credence would say, "Oh, your preferences are a lot like Alice (someone you don't know), whose preferences are also like Bob (someone who hasn't even rated anything similar to you), and you three are pretty much the exact opposite of Carol (someone else you don't know). Carol thumbs-downed X while Alice and Bob thumbs-upped it, so I'm going to suggest that it's a thumbs-up for you as well."

Notice the key elements of transitivity and negative correlation. Someone who disagrees with you all the time saying "this is bad" could actually make something good.

The idea was to kill linkspam by saying, "if spammers want to thumbs-up their own content, feel free -- but they'd better thumbs-up good content and thumbs-down other spam, at least moreso than they thumbs-up their own content, otherwise nobody will listen to them." In that sense the only way for a spammer to spam is if they contribute to killing spam in general, and it becomes a self-defeating business model.

It's a pretty nifty idea. PDF here:

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/credence/credence.pdf

Yeah, cluster analysis is a pretty great approach as long as you have enough users to cluster around, so often you have to have a non-social component to start things off for low amounts of users (rec more $$, Chinese, and/or San Mateo options because you liked Joy Luck Place; get more data; then rely more on social once you have data points.)

For things that mine Yelp, it's especially convenient because you can mooch data off of Yelp's social graphing. (Of course, scraping that would totally go against their ToS.)

Funny you would use that as an example! (Besides it being completely untrue). I avoid certain Burger King locations because I know how poorly they perform. Meanwhile, the reviews on Yelp actually reflect that franchise service can vary.

Let's address the pompous overtone of your post implying that fast food cannot be "good" and therefore should not receive 5-stars. Oddly enough your apparent attitude creates one of the major problems with rating systems. You seem to be a customer looking for a Michelin rated meal while ordering food served on a paper plate.

If I want fast food, 5 stars means something different than if I want a multi-course meal, means something different than if I want a slice of pizza, means something different if I want ethnic food.

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.

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"?

Yelp looks to be a great way to avoid the death spiral restaurants commonly find themselves in.

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.

It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff.

But if all your reviews are negative, it's possible you are doing something wrong. Restaurants are one of those professions where you have to be good at more than one thing; you have to design great menus, you have to buy good food, and you have to hire and manage good staff. As a chef, you may consider your ability to make a great menu the only thing that matters. Unfortunately, your customers disagree, thus causing the restaurant to fail. Sorry, that's life. (Same goes for great doctors that hire incompetent staff. I've had to stop going to a doctor I liked for that reason.)

I suppose, but the opinion article included no such information and neither has anyone else. It is possible to read filtered comments. Generating some basic statistics shouldn't be a problem for anyone who wanted to make a genuine claim that Yelp games ratings for advertising dollars. Until then, this submission is sour grapes.

>It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff

Yep! Could be the same exact run of the mill Italian food cooked exactly the same. Of course, a nice dining room, with food served by a native Italian speaker, and a fancy ambiance could very legitimately bump someone's opinion of a restaurant to the next level. Dining out isn't only about the flavor on the plate.

The comment should give the owner second thoughts of leaving his old staff behind. Maybe the owner doesn't think it important, but when a waiter can't pronounce an item on the menu or describe the ingredients knowledgeably it really breaks the experience of eating out.

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.

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.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco

What the hell??

Even as a user determined to see what the fuss is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. So I'm guessing nobody actually clicks through to the filtered reviews, whatever they actually are.

I love that Yelp helps me find interesting places in a dense area like NYC, but their business model is appalling.

I just did and I'm astounded that this filter even exists. From what I saw I got the feeling that the filter mechanism is broken.

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.

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 <5 reviews.

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).

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 wrong.

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).

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.

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.

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.

And, on top of that, it doesn't help the random anonymous user with 0 reviews submitted as much.

Someone should get on that though, because if you could solve the problem of how to set up proper recommendation systems for food, that'd be awesome.

Who knows, maybe Yelp as experimented with this? I don't know what kind of logged-in userbase they have though. Maybe if you had something integrated with the restaurants, where people could be logged in via their smartphones, and give a review to some NFC device at the restaurant. Lower the barrier of reviewing, encourage reviews right at the point of sale (similar to reviewing on netflix.com).

Someone must have already thought of this before though.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to game such a system. (You don't actually have to be at a restaurant to check into it, but you do need to be within a certain geographic radius -- so this would cut down on bogus or fraudulent reviews from people nowhere near the location). But those methods are harder to pull off, and they necessarily apply to a much smaller subset of potential gamers -- thereby making gaming a smaller-scale proposition.

Collaborative filtering would lend itself well to this model, too. Toss in some sort of karma system, as well, and you've got a check against system gaming and low-quality reviews.

I don't know if they see themselves as Yelp competitors, long-term, but I hope so.

How many of the fraudulent reviews on Yelp do we really believe are coming from fraudsters with this level of sophistication? My guess is that it's a pretty small percentage. Seems far more likely that most bogus reviews are coming from competitive small business owners, paid-off users, and other relatively average folk with a minimal level of technical understanding -- or even sufficient malice to drive them to become more sophisticated. (It doesn't help that Yelp may, or may not, be assigning greater weight to negative reviews unless/until a small business owner buys into their advertising).

I think this industry needs more of a q&a (quora type) approach where I can ask the same question that I would ask my friends. That way I'm only recommending places (take that as a 4+ star review) and not criticising businesses.

This benefits both customers by show places that have been recommended multiple times as an indicator of quality and business that don't suffer as a result of a bad night or rouge staff member.

This approach makes it easier to actually find what you too because by virtue of the way that place is suggested ("where is a good spot for breakfast?") we already get a ton of meta data.

Advertisers threatening to pull their accounts because the publication/channel has done something they don't like is the most visible manifestation of this, but the modern newspaper industry is basically run at the behest of advertisers and the typical output of these papers (just look at the amount of PR-driven stories that make it into the average paper on a daily basis) largely reflects this.

My company Whit.li has built an api to do just that. We are launching this weekend at SXSW check it out at whit.li.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A common looking filtered review (notice effusiveness, caps wording, and referencing other reviews):

"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."

Yelp itself has rough stats for the breakdown of reviews:

5 stars: 38% 4 stars: 29% 3 stars: 14% 2 stars: 8% 1 star: 11%

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.

Or they actually really like the business? It's not staffed by 30 different no names, and you never get the same server? The owner will actually be present and greet customers?

That's not gaming the system, that's providing great service in a fast food lifestyle.

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.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_busin...

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?

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!"

I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine. I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually used it.)

And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to be from businesses with some problem.

WRT your problem: Have you tried filtering by price ($, $$, $$$)? Perhaps if you did this, you would find good restaurants that aren't just rated highly because they are cheap.

On your last point, I disagree. I used to think that only bad restaurants would need to advertise. But then I ended up going to a restaurant that I saw had advertised heavily in the past on Yelp. I went there because they were in my neighborhood. The restaurant and food were absolutely fantastic (which matched their overall rating). So advertising is good for 1) new restaurants and 2) residents who don't know all the restaurants in their neighborhood.

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?

I'd settle for seeing those communications w/the sales team referenced in the article, though.

Yelp has repeatedly, strenuously denied the extortion claims, yet the accusations continue to come. I think a phone recording by one of these accusers would be an excellent smoking gun. Or if someone here calls on behalf of a restaurant or other business (that they have a stake in and has filtered reviews), they could report back to us on what happened. In the meantime, I'm inclined to apply the "innocent until proven guilty" principle in favor of Yelp.

http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html

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.

I think that would be a more valuable thing.

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.

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.

YMMV, but we think discovering through trusted friends rather than group averages is how the future looks.

This was yelps response when I reported this user: Hi there,

Thank you for inquiring about the reviews of Ray's Pizza on Yelp.

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.

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: https://biz.yelp.com/

Regards, Summer Yelp User Support San Francisco, California

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.

A number of them feel they deserve preferential treatment because of their Yelp status, and will go out of their way to bash you when that doesn't happen.

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.

Maybe Yelp is polluted and biased...or maybe Fior d' Italia just sucks. Occam's razor says it's the latter.

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 every single time.

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 :(

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...

preciouss.

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.

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.

But even if the controversies are unfounded...$1.5BB blows my &!%#ing mind. My personal perception is that I'm not even sure I trust the reviews.

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.

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.

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?

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.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yel...

TL; DR: I let Yelp override my own experience, what's up with that?

I think that restaurant and venue owners are wrong 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.

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.

One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is "Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what I do, not to what a stranger on the Internet inflicts 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 hate 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.

The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry, cannot 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.

Basically what I think they should do about it is

* Stop whining

* Read Seth Godin

* Compete instead of sue

As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few mental filters.

* Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews

* Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews

* 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)

By the way most restaurants have always relied on customer satisfaction to attract customers. This is true for most small businesses but it especially true for small restaurants. And this was true before yelp and even before the internet. A restaurant where each customer goes only once is usually doomed to failure (the exceptions are places in tourist traps and high traffic locations ... these restaurants are usually reliably awful, but they are the minority).

If you are the usual non-franchise non-tourist trap restaurant, you cannot afford much advertising or promotion. Your best hope for customers is someone wandering in, being happy and coming back again. Or maybe even telling their friends.

So the idea that restauranteurs now hate yelp because yelp somehow forces them to up their game is silly. Most of them have always relied on customer satisfaction as their main driver of business.

No, it's been alleged many times -- by unreliable sources. It's never been shown to be true, and in fact, the allegations that have made it to court have been dismissed for lack of evidence:

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/4622094-478/extortion-law...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020450530457700...

  Over the past year, I have attempted to get some clarity
  and assistance from Yelp. I have had no success except
  that its sales staff has repeatedly advised that if
  we would only advertise with them, they could "help us."

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp,_Inc.#Criticism_of_reviews is a good place to start digging, check their cites.

All I can find is this the dismissal of Levitt v Yelp where the Court, while "sympathetic to the ethical underpinnings of Plaintiff's argument" rules that editorial "immunity still applies regardless of whether the publisher acts in good faith", noting that "traditional editorial functions often include subjective judgments informed by political and financial considerations" [1].

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/70421921/Levitt-v-Yelp-Dismissal

I have a local business, and while we have great overall reviews, we have had MANY reviews filtered out by yelp's super-secret algorithms that are from actual customers. We also have a bad review that is by someone that has never visited our business, but is not filtered - despite our contacting yelp several times. All this is fine, overall we have great reviews - the problem is yelp has been contacting us weekly to run ads with them. Why would we run ads to bring people to a page that doesn't represent our business accurately?

Furthermore, the cost per impression/clicks is ridiculously high compared with the industry standards.

That being said, from the consumer perspective, I appreciate and frequently use yelp. ...I think they provide a valuable service, they just need to implement a better monetization method before I would consider investing.

If Yelp were dedicated to making its advertisers happy, it would quickly become useless for its users.

They are bleeding money, and they're forecast to do so for the near future. Bottom line is they need to figure out a better way to make money off what they do, or improve their value proposition for those customers who are generating the revenue.

Basically what I think Yelp should do is

* stop extorting entrepreneurs

* be more transparent

Then a few years after that, "It's a fad and it will die."

The a couple years after that, "When people catch on, they'll disappear!"

And, now, on the day that they went public, there are people still harping that Yelp's days are numbered.

Really? Remember they used to say that about Google (and still say they about Facebook).

Yelp is a reality that will _not_ go away. Venues have to adjust to the modern day reality that it's easy for people to share information. As you said, "There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy."

If Yelp did disappear, it wouldn't be because people "wised" up or because of some court order. But if they did, there are plenty to take its place. Facebook, Foursquare, or any other social media website that supports ratings of venues.

[1] http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e...

1. Listen to bad reviews. 2. Ignore good reviews.