So this is where it gets frustrating. When I'm heading to a new city for business meetings (which happens often) Google is great about auto-magically surfacing restaurant names close to where I will be. It's much faster and easier to use than Yelp.
But Google's "reviews" aren't really reviews at all. They're one-liners that people type into their phones, without telling me anything about local specialties or WHY some particular dish was good or bad. (What's "too spicy" for someone might be just what I want, etc.)
The best Yelp reviews are really informative. They're quirky and opinionated, but that's part of the fun of reading them. I routinely collect a couple Google-generated names and then look up the places on Yelp to get the real deal.
I understand that Yelp's sales team plays dodgy games with merchants to "fix" negative reviews, or to shake down merchants who don't buy ads. Wish they didn't.
But from a consumer standpoint, a seriously flawed Yelp is still more useful than a deluge of momentary burps from a Google system that is practically insight-free.
Google has the annoying tendency to ask people to rate and review places they've been near. When they get it wrong you get reviews like "never been to this place 1/5 stars".
I wish Google would incentivise helpful reviews and better verify that a user has actually been to a place before prompting them to review it. Something as simple as creating a guide on how to write a meaningful review could probably go a long way.
Google has plenty of issues on the consumer side, but from my experiences and everything i've heard they treat their advertisers well. At the very least, they're not an outright protection racket.
I found Google restaurant reviews in NYC to be generally very inflated. You'd think couple hundred reviews averaging out to be 4.6+ would mean pretty good experience, but I've learned to dial back my expectation.
Ratings are cultural as well. Compare to the traditional French scoring system where 19/20 was traditionally considered the highest attainable score as 20/20 was reserved for perfection (eg. something unattainable).[1]
I couldn't find a source for this but I once heard of an North American company which had opened some offices in northern Europe and used the same satisfaction survey across all offices. They were astonished to see satisfaction scores being so low in northern Europe so they launched an investigation into the matter. The result of the investigation was that satisfaction in the European offices was actually comparable if not higher than the North American offices, but culturally they would use a score like 3/5 to indicate that they had no complaints, reserving higher scores for when things were above and beyond great.
Someone with better Google-fu might be able to find a source because I probably got something wrong but I think that was the gist of the event.
Thanks for sharing. I wonder if Google should introduce option for users to view adjusted score. Meaning it would put higher weighting on users that have more balanced distribution of historical star ratings who have verified credential. I'm sure that may have some unintended consequences...
Is Google automated in this space, like most everything else Google does, or does it have actual people to make the same threats that Yelp reportedly does?
Google has automated fear on the client side: some of their most important products are "not for sale", but ad-spend might be used a signal in ranking. And because the ranking works in mysterious ways, nobody can do an informed cost/benefit decision, nobody dares to reject the Google what the Google is due. Advertisers faithfully put their money in the sacrifice box, afraid of finding out what would happen if they did not. Google has effectively deified itself.
Follow-up question: was it all a cunning plan or was it discovered by chance? My guess is the chance discovery.
But Google's "reviews" aren't really reviews at all. They're one-liners that people type into their phones, without telling me anything about local specialties or WHY some particular dish was good or bad. (What's "too spicy" for someone might be just what I want, etc.)
The best Yelp reviews are really informative. They're quirky and opinionated, but that's part of the fun of reading them. I routinely collect a couple Google-generated names and then look up the places on Yelp to get the real deal.
I understand that Yelp's sales team plays dodgy games with merchants to "fix" negative reviews, or to shake down merchants who don't buy ads. Wish they didn't.
But from a consumer standpoint, a seriously flawed Yelp is still more useful than a deluge of momentary burps from a Google system that is practically insight-free.