Yelp is Yuseless (Filtering)

The BBQ Pit
1

I don’t know how many people are aware of it, but Yelp uses a filtering system that removes reviews according to an arcane, secret and baffling protocol. The result is that most Yelp pages are nearly meaningless in helping you judge the restaurant or merchant.

It is not a case of filtering only bad review, or only good ones; you can find examples of high-rated businesses with dozens of filtered bad reviews, and vice versa. There is muttering that good reviews will be filtered until and unless you start advertising with Yelp, at which point “a fix can be found.” However, there are many listings that are unclaimed by the owning businesses that are both good-loaded and bad-loaded.

If there is any difference between reviews left in place and those filtered, I can’t detect it. Both categories hold reviews that are brief, illiterate, ranting, off-topic, unfair, bot-smelling, friend-smelling… and those that are evidently from careful, intelligent individual reviewers.

Yelp smugly refuses to discuss the filtering system in any way, claiming they are protecting their good reputation from gamers and hacks. There is no way to challenge filtering: Yelp suggests that over time, reviews will move back and forth between public and hidden and self-balance.

Try it yourself: pick a few businesses you’re familiar with, good and bad, and find them on Yelp. Read their public reviews. THEN click on the tiny, almost invisible link at the bottom and go through the human-ID CAPTCHA gate. Read the filtered reviews.

Can you find a one that makes sense? Do the public reviews, the hidden ones or the aggregate best represent the business?

It’s not just that filtering is taking place and that Yelp refuses to discuss it - it’s that it’s well-hidden (most users are probably unaware of it), and there’s no sense, rhyme or reason to the filtering.

Were you aware of the filtering? Can you make any sense of their apparent reasons and rules?

2

I became aware of the scale of the filtering fairly recently— found some restaurants where more than half of the total reviews were filtered out. Both bad and good reviews, some of which I couldn’t see anything wrong with. Didn’t appear to be shill reviews (in the case of good ones) or unreasonable screeds (in the case of bad ones).

I’ve written a few reviews of my own and some of them were filtered for no apparent reason. Google “yelp review filter” and you’ll see quite a bit of commentary about it, from disgruntled restauranteurs and reviewers alike, including some implications that Yelp has used the filtering to strategically “punish” restaurant owners who turned down their advertising solicitations. I don’t know if that’s true, but I definitely don’t trust the integrity of Yelp ratings anymore.

3

Yelp favors reviews from “members” of their “community.” One-off reviews by people who were driven to post a review because they were unusually impressed or pissed off by a business are filtered out, leaving the field to self-important wankers who believe that their every experience is so important that it must be shared with all the world.

Either that or it’s payola all the way.

4

I cant find the link

5

It says something like “(3 filtered)” at the bottom of the reviews, which is a clickable link.

6

I read this review the other day and got quite the chuckle out of it.

It’s a Chinese buffet. All the bad reviews were well written posts with decent grammar.

But the 'excellent" reviews were written by someone with broken English. Like say maybe an Asian business owner.

7

I wrote a glowing review for a place. A couple of weeks later, I discovered it had been disappeared. I was so pissed.

Then I decided I’d do an experiment. I wrote another review, for another place. Instantly, the other review came back.

I think the system favors reviewers with more than one review under their belt. If you only have one review, it suspects you’re some kind of a plant.

8

And one of the reviewers made a point of noting “I am not related to the owner”, plus the favorable reviewers almost always mentioned “healthy food”, as if they were working from a script. Nope, nothing suspicious about those reviews.

9

Having a track record of reviews is a good point, one I hadn’t thought of. Unfortunately… I do. Maybe a dozen on Yelp; haven’t checked all of them as most of my current irritation started with a local restaurant review. Once I discovered the filtering and poked around looking at it, I pretty much lost faith in Yelp as anything like a truly unbiased, community-based review system.

The second-biggest problem here is Yelp being so coy and obscure about both the existence of the filtering, and even the gist of what they consider ‘acceptable’ reviews. By the available evidence, it’s just an opaque con game.

The bottom line is that if you want to make use of this 500-pound gorilla, you have to ignore the ratings and take the time to read the filtered reviews, which are CAPTCHA’ed out of easy reach. Means you can’t check, say, all of five candidate restaurants without a lot of work.

10

Wait, so there are online review places that are actually helpful?

11

I picked a random restaurant and did what you said. Some of the filtered reviews were simply one sentence or one word reviews: “Yummmmm” was the extent of the “review” in a couple of them.

12

Although I’ve had a yelp account for some months, I did my first review (a bad one), a couple of weeks ago, and it hasn’t been filtered just because it’s my only one. Maybe the date-of-origin of the account being not right before the review has some effect.

There is one filtered (gushing) review for that place, and he has 11 reviews, all four or five stars. Perhaps he is a known or suspected shill.

13

I just checked out the reviews of 4 restaurants that I go to quite often and know very well. They all had more than 100 reviews. 3 out of the 4 did not have any filtered reviews. One had 168 reviews (avg 4 stars) and 9 filtered reviews. The filtered ones didn’t seem any different than the others, some were describing the restaurant as “meh” and some were “best place evar!”.

The one thing they did all have in common were that the filtered reviewers were posting for the very first time or only had 1 previous review under their belt. I agree with the other posters, it seems the filtering is based primarily on a reviewer’s posting history. I’m not seeing he outrage here. Maybe the OP could give a better example?

14

For a while there, Yelp filtered all of my reviews that were either 5 stars or 1. Determined to not get lost in the filtered page, I made an effort to build my Yelp standing. I added “friends” on Yelp, gave and received “compliments,” and did a few more reviews. Now, my reviews are literally never filtered, good or bad.

While Yelp undeniably leans toward the business owner’s favor, I suggest adding “friends” and sending “compliments.” Showing you’re a real person and not the business owner’s son trying to give a 5 star review or the business owner’s enemy trying to bring them down with a 1 star review will help get your stuff up at the top.

15

Whether Yelp’s intentions are good or bad, the filtering is a huge black mark on them, IMHO. It’s mysterious, erratic, semi-hidden and does not appear to be based on any very sophisticated algorithms. I am at best a rusty, outdated programmer and it’s been years since I did any formal info-processing, but I could write in a day or so a stack of filtering algorithms that would be effective, meaningful, hard to game and an asset to a review site. Sure as large an institution as Yelp can do that, or better, instead of this system that resembles that of a basement dwelling Star Wars message board operator.

16

I wrote a couple reviews for places, both positive and negative, and saw them get filtered. That was enough to permanently put me off the site. Not that the world can’t live without my opinions but I figured that if reviews I personally knew to be valid were thrown down the black hole, heaven only knows what other useful information it discards as well.

17

Exactly. The bottom line is that the process is opaque enough, and seemingly erratic and capricious enough, that the reviews and ratings become meaningless. Users simply cannot judge which reviews are valid and which ratings are composed of a real segment of reviewers.

In other words, Yelp is yuseless. :slight_smile:

18

Yelp’s policy doesn’t strike me as being out of line, really. They don’t want anyone putting in a half-dozen anonymous laudatory reviews by way of shilling for the business; by the same token neither do they want a single person writing dozen anonymous pittings to vent their RO. IIRC once you do become a registered user it’s difficult if not impossible to post multiple reviews for the same business.

At least you can still look at the filtered reviews, if you feel you must.

19

Actually, Spectre of Pithecanthropus, what it does it will link your old review to your new review-- so they’ll be stacked together with the new one on top, indicating it’s an update. Which makes sense, because I can have 5 great years at restaurant X, but then it can fall apart and be awful out of nowhere.

20

All 6 reviews I’ve written have been filtered. One still appears in my account yet doesn’t even exist as a filtered review in the restaurant’s account. Most of my reviews we’re positive, save one. It must be because of my lack of activity- they were fairly long, mentioning specific dishes.

I don’t really care, at least not enough to try to fix anything. It’s a bit of a shame for the reviews I wrote for restaurants in Rockford, IL, since they don’t have any other reviews.