# The Yelp website, and possible misuse **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 30, 2013, 8:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889 "2013-07-30T08:00:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![brujaja](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4af34b/32.png) [@brujaja](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brujaja)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 8:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/1 "2013-07-30T08:00:39Z")
This is an issue much complicated by the fact that it involves proprietary logarithms; but I’m interested to see what you folks might have to say. There is a gentleman I went to high school with, although I didn’t know him at the time. He studied law at a prestigious university in a nearby city, and has established his practice in a nearby large urban area. He and his partners have been there for years. With the advent of the Internet and social networking, the law firm acquired a listing on Yelp. (for those who don’t know, a business gets listed on Yelp when a customer chooses to post a review about them. Subsequent customers add their own reviews to the page. But the company can’t list itself.) This gentleman and I became acquainted through a mutual school friend on Facebook. At one point, he offered to answer some questions I had about protecting myself legally in a new business venture. He gave me very good advice which has been much to my benefit; what’s more, he declined to charge me for it. I felt that I wanted to post on Yelp about him because the advice was sound (and regarded a highly specialized field of law), very helpful, and from this and other interactions I can see that he is a competent and altruistic person. I posted a review. A few days later, I went back to look at it for some reason, and it was gone. I thought, maybe I made a mistake somewhere, so I wrote another one and posted it. It, too, disappeared. Come to find out that, nearly two years ago, an alleged DUI case client had given this attorney conflicting information about his case, and the response wound up getting filed in the wrong county. The guy wrote a bad review on Yelp. But here’s the weird part – _ **every single** _ subsequent review has been “filtered out” – i.e., these reviews do not show up on his page – only the 2-year-old bad one. The subsequent reviews are from various times since the bad one, spaced a few months apart. In other words, they’re not just a cluster posted right after the bad one to bury it. I certainly had no idea about any of that when I posted; and I have posted a dozen reviews of other places before that on Yelp at various times over a year or two, so I’m not a new, untried poster. I suspect that bad-review-guy works at Yelp, and has manipulated the page somehow. It just doesn’t make sense that ten naturally-occurring, bona fide reviews posted over a couple years’ time would all be filtered out for legitimate reasons. What say you? ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/2 "2013-07-30T08:41:46Z")
Wait, something isn’t clear. Ten years of good reviews that various people tried to post, but never showed up? So how do you know of the existence of those? ETA: Or, they showed briefly, long enough for your lawyer friend to notice them, then they disappeared, and you know of them because your lawyer friend told you of them? ---
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/3 "2013-07-30T10:26:09Z")
You’re not the first one to think there’s a conspiracy/outright blackmail going on. > **[Yelp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp,_Inc.#Disputes_over_legitimacy_of_reviews)** > > Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California. > Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. Yelp grew in usage and raised several rounds of funding in the following years. By 2010, it had $30 million in revenue, and the website had publ... [http://theyelpscam.com/](http://theyelpscam.com/) Only Yelp knows for sure, and they’re not about to tell you their algorithms (not logarithms). ---
**Author:** ![brujaja](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4af34b/32.png) [@brujaja](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brujaja)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/4 "2013-07-30T10:52:42Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > Wait, something isn’t clear. Ten years of good reviews that various people tried to post, but never showed up? So how do you know of the existence of those? > > ETA: Or, they showed briefly, long enough for your lawyer friend to notice them, then they disappeared, and you know of them because your lawyer friend told you of them? Not ten years, ten POSTS. Sorry that I didn’t explain it fully – near the bottom of a given Yelp page, in small plain letters, is an unobtrusive link that says: (10 filtered) If you even notice this link, and feel like clicking on it although it’s not stated what that means, you will get to the page of “filtered” reviews. \*\*Oh, wait, first you have to fill in a two-word captcha, \*\* though I can’t for the life of me imagine why bots would be trying to read “filtered out” reviews of businesses. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/5 "2013-07-30T13:07:32Z")
Yelp sucks. You’re repeating a thread I started oh, maybe a year ago. It’s not that Yelp is biased one way or the other, or blackmailing businesses for better reviews, but that their strange filtering system is so opaque, secretive and erratic that their reviews and rankings are meaningless. Some businesses have a string of filtered good reviews and a shitty rating; others have a string of filtered bad reviews and a glowing rating. There’s no pattern to it, no way to outguess or weight it, and it makes all attempts to find a good restaurant or business almost impossible. You have to weed it down to two or three and then laboriously read the filtered reviews and do your own algorithming to make a guess. Yelp sucks. Nuf sed. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/6 "2013-07-30T13:44:26Z")
> [@brujaja](#): > > This is an issue much complicated by the fact that it involves **proprietary logarithms** ; This is hilarious! Someone tell the PTO that you can’t patent math. 🙂 But otherwise, yes; [Yelp](http://justinvincent.com/page/1874/yelp-you-cost-me-2000-by-suppressing-genuine-reviews-heres-how-you-fix-it) is [terrible](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635&showFullText=true). Besides their shady business practices, I don’t know how they ever became as successful as they did. Doesn’t literally every site, especially Google, offer reviews? Why would I go to some other ratings site when I’m probably searching for restaurants in the area on Google maps, with Google reviews right on the page? ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/7 "2013-07-30T13:50:56Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > This is hilarious! Someone tell the PTO that you can’t patent math. 🙂 Proprietary doesn’t mean patented or barred from others’ use; it means no one else has them, or knows what they are. Coke’s formula is proprietary and other than taking on one of the biggest food conglomerates on earth, there’s nothing stopping anyone from duplicating it exactly. Several of the cheaper colas do so. Any review site could duplicate Yelp’s proprietary rules and algorithms, if they knew what they were (and were really stupid). > [@](#): > > Besides their shady business practices, I don’t know how they ever became as successful as they did. Doesn’t literally every site, especially Google, offer reviews? Their presentation is probably better than anyone else’s, and through a huge marketing and penetration push, they edged out other would-bes. They have very few gaps in their review coverage, which is their strongest point. They are easy to use, easy to search, and their listings are easy to evaluate at a glance. Too bad it’s reeking bullshit all the way down. But that’s never mattered much to mass consumers, whether of burgers, beer or search engines. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/8 "2013-07-30T14:37:14Z")
> [@brujaja](#): > > This is an issue much complicated by the fact that it involves proprietary logarithms > [@DrCube](#): > > This is hilarious! Someone tell the PTO that you can’t patent math. 🙂 My guess is that the OP meant “[algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm).” ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/9 "2013-07-30T14:51:41Z")
> [@brujaja](#): > > What say you? I say that this thread seems inappropriate for General Questions. Reported for forum change. ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/10 "2013-07-30T15:13:51Z")
Its 100% fact that review sites need an income, and there’s only one way they can get it. Would their sponsors be able to get their appearance changed ? yes ! ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/11 "2013-07-30T16:05:37Z")
> [@Isilder](#): > > Its 100% fact that review sites need an income, and there’s only one way they can get it. There’s a difference between advertising and outright shilling. I don’t think that’s what Yelp’s problem is, anyway. You can find just as many sites that have one or two good reviews and many bad ones filtered as the other way around, and many of them as much as say they are “unclaimed” by the owners - or they are evidently so, from the amount of wrong or missing information in the listing. If Yelp is fixing review lists for pay, they’re really, really bad at it. I think the real problem is they are trying to run a nearly Amazon-scale online presence with as few people as possible, so bots and algorithms do most of the work. ---
**Author:** ![Yarster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/7c8e57/32.png) [@Yarster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yarster)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/12 "2013-07-30T17:37:47Z")
Not to defend Yelp, because I don’t know how it works any better than the rest of you in terms of any ranking system, but if you look at it from their point of view, it would be very easy for a new business looking to get customers to go to a third party and have them write lots of fake reviews shilling for a company from numerous e-mail address and locations over a period of time to artificially look good. I can only imagine that if the reviews use certain key words, all sound like they are written by the same person, are all the same length, or all show up in a short amount of time relative to each other that it might get flagged as suspicious. Personally, I expect some level of shilling BS on a yelp review. I generally only look at Yelp for restaurants, and even then, I just skim them to see if there is a particular dish they serve they is better than the rest and likewise, if there is one I want to avoid in a bad review, along with the overall number of good reviews versus bad and the nature of the bad ones. In the early days of Yelp, I can remember there would be small businesses I would look into (often for ethnic restaurants), where the reviews would all be from ‘different’ people, yet would all use the same broken English and generally be the same length. ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/13 "2013-07-30T18:13:07Z")
> [@Yarster](#): > > Not to defend Yelp, because I don’t know how it works any better than the rest of you in terms of any ranking system, but if you look at it from their point of view, it would be very easy for a new business looking to get customers to go to a third party and have them write lots of fake reviews shilling for a company from numerous e-mail address and locations over a period of time to artificially look good.. It even has a name > **[Astroturfing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing)** > > Astroturfing is the deceptive practice of hiding the sponsors of an orchestrated message or organization (e.g., political, economic, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, unsolicited grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial backers. > The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" ... ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/14 "2013-07-30T20:52:13Z")
This is my personal opinion, not a factual answer: Yelp is absolutely worthless. If you brought up Yelp in your browser then you just wasted 3 cents of electricity. ---
**Author:** ![leahcim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b4bc9f/32.png) [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/15 "2013-07-30T21:32:39Z")
> [@RaftPeople](#): > > If you brought up Yelp in your browser then you just wasted 3 cents of electricity. Damn! How much power does your computer use? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/16 "2013-07-30T21:37:54Z")
Also note that people who aren’t even customers of a business will post opinionated comments on Yelp, about a company if the company is in the news with some bad press. Witness, for example, the reaction to the Wellston Bank snafu in the news recently. There’s a whole page of people bad-yelping them now. (Recent thread [here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=697782). See [Post #10](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16517712&postcount=10) for link to Yelp page. Pit thread [here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=697738). ) ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/17 "2013-07-30T21:48:01Z")
> [@brujaja](#): > > What say you? For a small fee, I can post in your thread and make sure it stays at the top of the page. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/18 "2013-07-30T21:55:19Z")
There are a number of ways Yelp could make reviews meaningful and reasonably trustworthy. What I find astounding is that they appear to be avoiding every single one of them in favor of an opaque, badly broken bot-driven system. It all boils down to an unwillingness to staff up to the levels needed to moderate and review comments and a reliance on really shitty algorithmic analysis that would flunk as a low-level comp sci project. Yelp could do better, easily. They choose not to. They are unfortunately too big for anyone to displace easily, so we have no good, widespread, trustworthy business listing/review system. ---
**Author:** ![brujaja](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4af34b/32.png) [@brujaja](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brujaja)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/19 "2013-07-30T22:08:16Z")
_ **ALGORITHM!** _ :smack:Sheesh! Everyone knows that a _ **logorithm** _ is what you use to sort corporate trademarks. \ ---
**Author:** ![listedmia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e0b2c6/32.png) [@listedmia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/listedmia)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 9:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889/20 "2013-07-31T09:58:45Z")
Another Yelp annoyance: there do doesn’t seem to be a way for a business owner to change the information at the top of the page. At my current job, they changed the hours 3 years ago; Yelp still has the old hours listed. We have decent reviews and we get a good deal of business from there, so we still have people showing up hours after closing time, because “It said that on the internet!” [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-yelp-website-and-possible-misuse/664889.md?page=2)