Really? I find even Yelp reviews low quality in general, so I use older methods (food forums like Chowhound or eGullet, some bloggers I'm familiar with, sometimes even newspaper critics) to find restaurants.
Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher.
Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.
I've been able to get some value out of Yelp reviews by using the the following guidelines:
First and of course, look at the overall number of reviews and score as a rough guideline. You're probably not going to get burned going to a place with 700 reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Might not be as good as its reviews, but it's probably not crap.
Second, ignore any review with the word "groupon" or "scoutmob" in it. For whatever reason these always seem to be nitpicks about service specifically related to the offer. And if I had a dollar for every "Groupon was for item A, I wanted to apply it to item B, they wouldn't, one star" I've seen, I'd be a wealthy man.
Third, ignore most of the five star and one star reviews. Mostly undeserved gushing, and angry ranting, respectively.
Fourth, generally avoid anything from a user that has "Yelp Elite" next to their names. While some of these are good reviews from informed food enthusiasts, a lot of them are just long-winded twee crap from folks who like the idea of being "elite" at something.
Finally (and most importantly), pay special attention to the two and three star reviews. This is the meat of Yelp. They will say moderately bad things about the restaurant, usually with reasons to back it up. Often you'll start to see a theme. Whatever issues the restaurant has, this is where you'll find them. This is where you'll find out the popular place for some cuisine is actually kind of mediocre and everyone familiar with that cuisine goes somewhere else that's less popular but has better food, or whatever.
Then you ask yourself, "Is this something I care about?" If I want the best Ćevapi in town, do I really care about the dozen two and three star reviews that complain that the waiters only speak Croatian? Or will I show up with my handy Croatian phrasebook?
Yelp is a pit of crap, but there's gold in that crap. Usually.
>pay special attention to the two and three star reviews.
I find that's often the case on Amazon as well. On your typical book review, say, there are a lot of 4s or 5s that are gushing praise because it's someone's favored author or genre or whatever. 1s tend to be "It sucked. Read 10 pages and threw it out."
2s and 3s as you say are more likely to be along the lines of "Really tried to like it because it had good ideas and I've liked author X in the past but this book was just too disjoined and confusing to recommend it."
I've found 1 star reviews to be hugely useful on Amazon. Often have seen detailed contrarian 1 star reviews for books that have nearly a 5 star average and found very interesting viewpoints. This works especially well when you're suspicious of the product being a scam - less the case for books, but very useful for other consumer products. The 1 star reviews are where people who received a cheap knock off or something that broke or otherwise failed quickly complain. I like to read the 2 and 3 star reviews as well but there's a similar amount of filtering necessary in my experience.
'Sometimes even newspaper critics' - oh man this is harsh. I don't like the biases that newspaper critics tend to have but Pete Wells and Ruth Reichl at the Times, Sietsema (previously at the Village Voice, now at Eater) all do excellent reporting.
But I agree that it all pales in comparison to amateur enthusiast communities and specialist blogs.
I put Yelp in the category of often (maybe even usually) better than sticking a finger on the map. Or just finding some minimally acceptable place. But, I agree that it's not great and, for me at least, a lot of reviewers seem to have very different priorities than I do and there often do seem to be a lot of weird complaints.
I find Yelp a very reliable source of tourist traps.
If you’re not in an area where that’s a risk, it’s not a good way to find -good- food, but it’s a good way to find the best local mainstream food. If the local mainstream best is mediocre... yeah, it’ll be 5 stars on yelp.
I don't really disagree with that. It's also a reasonably good way (most of the time) to avoid really bad choices. I certainly don't love Yelp but it's often better than alternatives when traveling. It's not like I find asking for recommendations at a hotel necessarily yields great results either.
You can’t go by the calculated review number; you should read the reviews (which it seems like you already do on other sites.) I would focus on the individual reviews and ignore the aggregate entirely.
It would also be nice if you could rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately. But you can’t, so it’s meaningless.
The evidence against Yelp seems to amount to a (from what I can tell sizeable) population of small business owners who claim that Yelp 1. is extremely aggressive about selling its advertising services (perhaps annoying, but not criminal) and 2. responds to failure to buy these services by filtering or deleting positive reviews.
Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least.
Yelp has turned these attacks away in court, but the (apparent) last ruling on this seemed to come down to an inability on the plaintiffs' side to prove Yelp actually changes review visibility based on advertising [1].
It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation. But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms. It's not like I'm using Reddit posts to support anti-vax arguments, small business owners can definitely reason about how Yelp operates from their interactions with it.
"Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least."
No, the "evidence" exists entirely in hearsay form. All you ever see are stories about parents, friends of friends, distant cousins, and so on. There's almost never so much as a link to the business page. Why? Because it's trivial to debunk these claims when you can see the reviews.
"It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation."
Not just silly, but absurd. It's internet conspiracy theory, and people are just thoughtlessly repeating it as fact.
"But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms."
If Yelp revealed how reviews are filtered, the filters would be rendered useless overnight. It would be the equivalent of Google publicly documenting their search algorithm. And while I think Yelp does many things badly when it comes to this stuff, they're 100% clear about how reviews and ads interact: they don't.
> I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.
I wouldn't expect there to be a literal code switch that deletes bad reviews if someone pays for ads. But I can imagine a system developing naturally (even by accident!) where it's easier to get a human at Yelp to intervene when non-customers or bots left bad reviews.
Did Yelp have systems in place (e.g. a "Chinese wall") to prevent someone's status as a customer from impacting their ability to resolve a complaint about abusive negative reviews?
>Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.
Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.
Disagree. Take El Faro on 1st [1], it’s actually pretty good (their taco dorado al pastor is really good), yet it has a 2.5 rating. It’s also been in business for years, so clearly something else is keeping them alive than their yelp rating. And if you look at individual reviews, there are a bunch of 4 and 5 stars, yet they disappear when scrolling a search list.
I’ve also found many 4+ star restaurants entirely overrated and quite mediocre.
It’s all about the category and how it fits into the local milieux, which might place emphasis on things you don’t care about or expect (the ambiance sucks at el faro, for example, but it’s a lunchtime tacqueria I could care less). People take away stars from it because it’s cash only. Sorry, but what exactly is it that we’re rating here?
That lack of common consensus and the wide disparity between expectations means yelp aggregates aren’t always so useful. I wish they did a better job of showing me the reviews and stars of the things that matter to me, not to the shapeless aggregate. Or at least give me a sense of the distribution to know if there’s more/less contention than normal.
Yelp's reviews are probably real, but Yelp also throws out a lot of real reviews, and they do this in a way that will skew the star rating up or down depending on whether the business purchases Yelp ads.
Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.
On The Infatuation we have staff writers visit a restaurant multiple times and make sure we have our opinion has been as informed as possible. Our biggest problem is scaling that process and we want to use Zagat to help with that via user generated content. We want to take learnings from other UGC platforms to inform the direction we take with Zagat and a big piece of that is authenticity.
Do you have a specific market of consumers you want to target?
A while ago there was large thread on Reddit asking anyone who had eaten at the Olive Garden in Times Square, why[1] they had chosen to eat there. There were people who thought it was one of the funniest questions that they'd ever read on /r/askreddit, and people who didn't understand why it was an interesting or funny question.
Byant Park Grill is a nearby restaurant that is not a tiny hole in the wall, and the dishes are not that exotic. For context, here are two dishes that are on today's menu at the different restaurants:
"Grilled salmon topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Served with parmesan-crusted zucchini"
The prices are not extremely different, the wait times are similar if you show up at the door, and it would be naïve to think that Olive Garden hasn't put a lot of thought and research into exactly how they make their food. I wouldn't be surprised if the diners at Bryant Park Grill are even disappointed in their meals more often than the diners at Olive Garden, but I suppose they also think something is above average more often at Bryant Park Grill and occasionally excellent.
The same people at Bryant Park Grill might go to Olive Garden, but it is to bring a group of their summer interns for a celebration or maybe when dining out with elderly family members. When they travel with their own families, they avoid chain restaurants and look for either a generic diner, or a restaurant that has been recommended verbally by a local or someone working at the desk at a hotel.
How do people who consider something like the Bryant Park Grill a large restaurant with a safe, but not exceptional menu quickly find the equivalent somewhere like Palo Alto? I feel like asking a dozen people between 30 and 60 would find them all suggesting the same two or three restaurants, but review sites never seem to be able to do this. Instead, sites like Yelp seem to have a lot of reviewers who are talking about themselves as tastemakers, who pride themselves on discovering secret gems, and being offended by something weird at places that have favorable word-of-mouth reputations.
It seems like an unusual problem. Zagat reviewers[1] were volunteers, but they remained anonymous so there was little opportunity to promote themselves. If I remember people seemed motivated by getting a guide sent to them and feeling like they were part of an in group. I don't know what would work now to avoid fake reviews and reviews promoting the reviewers.
It would be interesting to see what happened if it were limited to a subset of people who used OpenTable for minimum number of reservations per year or some other metric, and then was based on a Keynesian Beauty Contest[1], where a consensus is divined by reviewers earning prizes for correctly guessing which restaurants other reviewers like.
Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher.
Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.