Investors Find Ways to Indirectly Profit from Valuable Startups

Re:Investors Find Ways to Indirectly Profit from Valuable St... by nosuchthing on Monday August 10, 2015 @04:02PM (#10036921)

What is the reason for the huge fluctuation in the search results from one week to the next for something like BBQ? As in one day a restaurant shows up on the first page, and a few days later it was buried 6 pages deep? This observation correlated with the business owners refusing to pay Yelp's cold call sales team has nothing to do with the article you mention.

Looking at the search results for pizza sorted by the "best match" algorithm is mind boggling.

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Re:Investors Find Ways to Indirectly Profit from Valuable St... by timr on Monday August 10, 2015 @05:16PM (#10037432)

"This observation correlated with the business owners refusing to pay Yelp's cold call sales team has nothing to do with the article you mention."

No, it doesn't. Setting aside the fact that you haven't actually done the analysis (so you couldn't find a correlation if you wanted to), it's an example of "people who want to believe in a conspiracy will find evidence for the conspiracy", with a nice helping of the post-hoc fallacy: Yelp has a huge army of sales people calling businesses every day. Rankings are also updated 24/7. It is inevitable that someone will be called, at random, right before they experience a ranking change.

A search as generic as "BBQ" or "pizza" is going to have a lot of variation, because people are constantly using those tokens in reviews, and they match across a huge number of businesses. I very sincerely doubt that there are 6-page differences in a business' ranking on a day-to-day basis, but if it does occur, it has nothing to do with their advertising status.

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