Their sales tactics are borderline abusive, too. They will hunt you down forever until you sign a package with them, and they give you zero time to think about whether their ad package (which only works on their site and has a super high CPC compared to AdWords) is right for your business.
They need to go away
This is false. Source: I worked there, on search. You cannot pay to rank higher in search.
You can argue whatever you want about your former employers but convincing SBOs that Yelp aren't extortionist scumbags based on this detail is not going to fly.
Source: I work directly with maid services and trust in Yelp is at an all time low. Literally the first comment when they are mentioned in our private group is something along the lines of "Die in a grease fire" or "F*ck Yelp". And this is from some of the nicest ladies (mostly) that you'll meet.
No, it's a common rumor. Repeating rumors does not make them true, and this "knowledge" is completely false.
I have no financial or business interest in Yelp. I just don't enjoy seeing my own work, and the work of my colleagues, disparaged by completely unsubstantiated rumor mongering.
Yelp is also terrible for owners who purchase a business and are strong armed into doing business with yelp on order to remove all the previous bad ratings, description, contact info, etc. (Source: bought 1 bar in LA and 2 in LV)
ads from paying businesses list higher than search results; this effectively means you pay to be "indexed" higher
Yelp is weird because when it's good, the reviews are great and super insightful. But you don't necessarily get a great picture of the area. (My typical use case I showing up in randomtown, USA for 24-48 hours.)
4sq's venue ratings is hit or miss. I've definitely found some good places to eat at (that I would've otherwise not found), but I've also eaten at a ton of places that are highly rated but nothing special. For the latter, perhaps they are good relative to the immediate area, but not really that good.
In cities like SF, NYC, etc, I've had much better luck with recommendations from Foursquare and Yelp. Especially with new places.
Somewhat surprisingly this is the case for a lot of travel POI type sites (hotel referral commission rates are so high). Even a site like Kayak gets a significant portion of its revenue from hotel bookings.
While other things may be fudged for profitability, there was a clear line between content and advertising we didn't cross.
There are quite a few TA people on HN. Maybe one will chime in?
TA is definitely my go-to app when I go places; it is pretty good both as a consumer and as a listee.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/n684/tripadv...
The solution is classification instead of ranking.
I am more interested in a Mediterranean place that cooks falafel to order and has tahini sauce than I am in a 4-star Mediterranean restaurant.
Conveniently those are all verifiable facts, so there's no need to wrestle with subjectivity.
Kevin Rose did a short-lived app called Oink [1] a few years ago with the idea of ranking individual dishes at each restaurant. I really thought (and still think) there's a huge potential for this concept.
Every day I have some query like "show me all of the places that serve falafel within 15 minutes of me" or "what are all of the shops with sandwiches in my neighborhood?" Running those kinds of queries on the traditional POI sites like Yelp or Google Maps is pretty ineffective.
You preferences aren't the mean or the median, I suspect.
> I am more interested in a Mediterranean place that cooks falafel to order and has tahini sauce than I am in a 4-star Mediterranean restaurant.
However, just because a Mediterranean place cooks falafel to order and has tahini sauce doesn't mean that they cook the falafel well, that the service is decent, etc.
I'm also personally _more_ interested in the availability of falafel and tahini sauce than the number of stars a restaurant has, but I use the ranking/reviews to determine which place would be the most enjoyable to eat at. 70% of the Mediterranean restaurants near me may offer falafel, the question is which of them will not be a subpar experience. Unfortunately rankings/reviews definitely aren't always correct, hence this conversation, but I definitely think they still have a place.
Personally I weigh a high number of positive, detailed reviews with photos over the number of stars a restaurant has.
For local restaurants, eh, I just visit them once. What I'm looking for in a restaurant seems to vary too much from what folks who leave reviews are looking for. e.g, some folks really care about how long it takes their meal to arrive or the quality of the service. To me, the quality and consistency of the meal is most important, so I'll forgive a slow kitchen or an occasional bad server or server having a bad day. Also, as they say, there's no accounting for some people's taste. :-)