I avoid yelp.com for the exact reason you describe in the OP - the information does not appear trustworthy.
Although the extortion lawsuits against them were dismissed because there wasn’t enough evidence - based on what I read from multiple places it sure looks from the outside like there is something there.
In the greater DC area, I find Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide to be a good source for locating a good restaurant of the sort I want in the part of town I expect to be in.
Obviously, that’s no help for people in other metro areas, but I’ve had nothing but good luck with it here.
I use Yelp as most people here describe: I use it to find reputable businesses. I don’t have a network of friends I can use for this, so I’d have a tough time evaluating any other way. I don’t trust Yelp, because people are more driven to complain than to praise, and because people lie, but if a business gets a lot of good comments, and not so many bad comments, then that’s a good sign. If they get lots of bad comments, but they’re all stupid (people complaining about getting what they paid for, mostly), then I don’t worry about them.
I use much the same policy when reading online reviews: some people complain about stupid crap they they caused, or should have known about, or that I would actually value. I ignore those. I also ignore vague glowing reviews, reviews that praise things I don’t like or don’t care about, etc.
I’m very disturbed to read about this filtering business. I knew there was some sort of filtering, which is a good thing, but their algorithm is seriously out of whack. RaftPeople, the class-action suit was not dismissed for lack of evidence, it was dismissed because Yelp is immune – as purveyors of public-sourced content, they can’t be sued for that content. I believe this is a horrible misuse of that rule, as the suit was not about content – which they cannot control, which is the reason for the immunity – but manipulation of that content, which – if it’s happening – should strip them of immunity (morally, not legally – back off, Bricker!)
I look at the reviews occasionally for restaurants. Not the only ones.
The “reviews” for anything but food places is nothing but habitual complainers bitching about perceived slights.
Yelp is well strange for lack of a better word.
At the last dealership I worked at we had, according to the car maker, excellent CSI. Looking at our Yelp reviews you would never know it. They were average or a bit above.
There was one I remember particularly well. Guy blasted us for our service. As near as I could tell he was never a customer, and he lived in San Francisco. Also his other “reviews” were all negative for business in the LA area, and Hawaii.
We had a number of our customers give us good reviews, which appeared for a bit and then disappeared. So we stayed average.
I will use the Yelp mobile app to find business in an area, but I don’t read the reviews at all, I don’t trust them.
This is generally correct, but it is possible to read Yelp and figure out whether some place is worth checking out or not. And the negative reviews (depending on what they are complaining about) can actually make me want to visit a restaurant more, because what the reviewer is complaining about is something I enjoy. (Like complaining about there not being enough cheese on a pizza, which is a plus for me, as most pizzas around here have so much cheese you can peel it off in a single layer. Or the ones that complain about long lines at places that are known to have long wait times. What an idiotic complaint–what do you want the restaurant to do, create some sort of transdimensional portal to seat the overflow of customers?)
Perhaps it’s more work than it’s worth, but you can get a general sense of who is full of shit, and who is being fair. I don’t trust reviews that are a string of generalities with no specifics, and I don’t trust reviews that go into microscopic detail of every little thing and have that vibe of “know-it-all-ness” to them.
Like most other people here, i use Yelp, but try to use it judiciously. You have to apply the same sort of bullshit filter that you do to any other vast, open, essentially anonymous user community. There are a lot of idiots, douchebags, and people with axes to grind on the internet, and plenty of them love using Yelp.
I agree with Diosa that the filtering of the positive reviews might have more to do with who wrote the reviews than with your restaurant. When i first joined Yelp, it was to post a positive review about a local store, but my 5-star review was immediately filtered and did not appear on the results page. A few weeks later, though, after i had made a few more reviews (including some critical ones), my initial review was suddenly unfiltered and appeared on the store’s page.
Basically, what they’re trying to do is make sure that the store’s owner or employees or family or friends aren’t signing up just to plug the store on Yelp.
That’s not to say that the story about Yelp wanting money to help you with you reviews is bogus, though. A few years back, there were quite a few stories about this, and although Yelp constantly denied that they were extorting businesses by withholding good reviews, there were enough stories about the problem that i strongly suspect there was some truth to it.
Here’s a few examples from the Consumerist website:
Companies Accuse Yelp Of Review Extortion, Yelp Says No Way (Feb. 2009)
More Business-Owners Accuse Yelp Of Review Extortion (Mar. 2009)
Yelp Accused Of More Negative Review Extortion (Feb. 2010)
In your case, i wouldn’t worry too much. I would be very unlikely to visit or not visit a business based on a total of two Yelp reviews, even if they were both bad reviews. I tend to look for bigger patterns than that when i use the site.
Some businesses actually pay people to write positive Yelp reviews for them. I guess it’s possible that some businesses also pay people to write negative reviews about the competition. I like this story: Yelp Reviewer Gives 1 Star For Restaurant That Hasn’t Opened Yet.
What do you mean “known to have long wait times”?
If i’m looking for a place on Yelp, chances are that it’s a place i don’t know about yet, especially if i’m away from home in a new city. How the hell would i know that it has long wait times unless the Yelp reviewers tell me? For me, eating out is about the whole experience, and standing around outside waiting for my table for 40 minutes is a part of that experience. There are times when i would be willing to do that, depending on the occasion and the restaurant, and times when i would not.
There’s a place not far from my house that has decent breakfast food. On weekends, though, if you want to eat breakfast there, you can easily wait for half an hour. For me, the food and the wait need to be considered together. The food at this place near my house is good enough if i don’t have to wait, but it’s not good enough for me to spend a half-hour standing on the sidewalk.
I agree that the restaurant can’t put people in seats that it doesn’t have, but a restaurant also needs to recognize that if people have to wait a long time, they might prefer to go somewhere else. That’s the wonder of the market; people will make decisions based on things like supply, demand, and opportunity cost, and those decisions are best made with as much information as possible.
Well, yes I did mean the entire sandwich when it’s done. They really are big, most people end up sharing a sandwich or taking the second half home, but maybe we should rethink the amount of meat. 4oz is what our rep advised as generous. We do two whole slices of cheese, not one cut in half. Does that help? 
Thanks you guys for all the input. We do have a suspicion that the reviewer might be an employee of a competitor, but that may be wishful thinking on our part.
I find positive reviews more irritating than the negative ones; it’s much easier to weed out frivolous complaints than it is inflated praise. If someone says, for example, that a restaurant has long wait times, that is specific feedback whose value I can weigh. If someone complains about the lousy parking in an urban neighborhood or the non-vegan friendly menu at a BBQ place, I can safely ignore those criticisms as asinine.
It’s when someone fawns over how the food was soooo good, and the pork sooo tender that I ask myself if the reviewer is the same kind of asshole who thought the Moons Over My Hammy dinner she got at Arby’s was the best thing she’s ever had. This has happened to me a lot, btw, being perplexed by crazy four star plus reviews for mehtacular, and in some cases flat out shitacular, places. I signed up for Yelp specifically to state I was underwhelmed by a restaurant that everyone else had unanimously decided was the best thing ever.
I just look for spots in the desired areas, then pick something. I will at times skim the reviews taken with a boulder-size grain of salt.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. It means exactly that. Here’s some in Chicago.
You don’t have to do huge. Frankly, I think a return to reasonable portions could only be a good thing. Moderate amount of meat, with quality bread and toppings sounds perfect.
This is the danger of trying to adjust based on comments here and there. What is YOUR vision of your restaurant? Hummongoid sandwiches? Artisan breads? Home atmosphere? Bistro setting? You can’t be all things to everybody and you’ll twist yourself up trying. I’d be annoyed at a place that constantly changed with the wind (unless that was their focus- seasonal etc) and things I liked disappeared based on a negative review.
Make your food good, fairly priced and accurately advertised. Have pleasant service and a decent enough variety to appeal (though, look at In and Out burger- they only have a few items!).
If you had actually read the rest of my post, my point would have been very clear.
Known by whom?
If i landed in Chicago yesterday, and i’m looking for a restaurant in my hotel’s neighborhood today, chances are pretty good that i’m not familiar with which Chicago restaurants have long wait times. As someone who doesn’t live in Chicago, i probably also don’t spend a lot of time reading Chicago Magazine. Ergo, it is helpful to me if Yelp reviewers discuss the wait times at the restaurants in their reviews.
Even in my own city, i know which restaurants have long wait times among the places that i like to go, but if i’m going to try a new place, i may not have any idea about how long the wait times are going to be. Again, it’s helpful if i can find that out by reading reviews on Yelp.
I should have been more specific in my complaint.
Telling someone there is a long wait is relevant information. What pisses me off is the Yelpers who give the place one star based solely on the wait times, even though the food was fine, and even though the reviewer states in their review they knew about the legendary wait times. There’s not much a place can do about it, and I don’t think it should be docked any stars just because it happens to run a place that everybody wants to go to. That is what is, to me, idiotic. Here is a sample negative review from Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix:
To me, that’s not a one-star review. (Incidentally, Pizzeria Bianco has much shorter wait times now as they expanded their operation to lunch hours, so the last time we were there, we actually just walked in and got a seat, whereas the two times before that we waited 2 1/2 and 1 1/2 hours respectively.)
And I would never encourage anyone to solely use Yelp! to decide on a restaurant. Find something that sounds interesting, then Google the restaurant and find other reviews of it on other site, or hopefully in magazines.
Or, I should say, it would be more useful for me if the Yelp! restaurant reviews had separate categories for food, service, wait times, atmosphere, value, and that sort of thing. I’m the type of person who normally does not care about service or wait times or anything like that, as long as the food is great and reasonably priced. It would be good if I could filter by, say, the food rating and ignore everything else.
But, yeah, you’ll still get “rating bleed” in from the other categories. Somebody who is royally teed off at the service will probably downrate the food, even if it were top notch.
I agree that the wait times should not be used as an excuse to give a really shitty overall review if everything else was good. I also quite like the idea of separate ratings for food, service, atmosphere, etc. But that’s why i tend to read the reviews rather than just look at star ratings.
I still think, though, that the wait times can legitimately be considered as a factor in a review, even if you knew about them beforehand. You’re right that a place can’t control the fact that it’s popular, but different places deal with that in different ways. Some allow you to make reservations. In such cases, i know that i can call ahead, make a reservation, and be guaranteed a seat at or around a specific time. Others refuse to take reservations, which means that i’m left with waiting ages for my name to be called from a list, or not going. It is their right to choose to do business that way, but it’s a business model that reduces my enjoyment of the restaurant.
Also, if a place is so popular that the standard wait time is 90 minutes, it seems to me that a few people complaining about the wait times on Yelp, and downgrading the restaurant as a result, probably isn’t going to hurt it too much.
Yelp is a great place to read reviews - one of my favorite websites.
Sure, but reservations don’t make sense for a lot of places and there is something to be said for a reservation-less system. If I’m in the mood for a Kuma’s burger tonight, I can get one if I’m willing to wait a bit for it. I don’t have to call ahead and reserve a spot days, weeks, or perhaps even months in advance.
Then again, there’s places like Burt’s Pizza here where not only you have to make a reservation (regardless of how busy or not the place is), but you have to call your pizza order in ahead of time, or it throws Burt completely off. I’m not 100% sure it’s a requirement, but it’s very much stressed by anybody who has ever been there to reserve and order ahead if they want to eat there.
I find the sweet spot for Yelp is generally restaurants that average about 4 stars. Most of the places I love tend to have a lot of rave 5 star reviews, with a good number of 1 star reviews complaining about things I personally find frivolous. (Then again, there’s one fantastic goat place by my house that has 106 reviews without a single one-star or two-star review. That’s a pretty incredible spread for Yelp! and the rating is fully justified, in my opinion. If I saw any other place with a rating spread like that, I would visit it post-haste.)
But, in general, it is probably more the negative reviews that make me want to visit a place than the positive reviews. It’s easier to judge what people are complaining about and whether they know what they’re talking about than it is to judge the positive reviews, at least IMHO. I do the same thing with any vendor. I don’t care about the high rating. I want to see what the low ratings are, whether they have a common denominator, when they are dated, and whether it is something I feel is a legitimate complaint or just somebody being bitchy.
We’re avid Yelpers. I review every place we eat, and the wife looks at reviews before we hit anyplace new.
I’ve written several in depth reviews of places I’ve been, a couple positive and a couple negative and they’ve all been flagged as spam and buried. So I figure their review process must be for shit if they’ve dumped four or five reviews I know were legit.
How many reviews have you done and what kind of feedback have they gotten? My first half-dozen reviews were filtered until I had done maybe 10 or so, with good feedback. Now none of my reviews get stuck in the filter.