Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

Re:Lone Yelp review dogs business owner by flourophore on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:45PM (#2959718)

How can a computer evaluate the 'realness' of a review? The idea of Yelp, crowdsourced business reviews, is great, but do we really prefer trusting super active web content contributors, seeking cyberspace attention, over experts (eg Zagats)?

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Re:Lone Yelp review dogs business owner by patio11 on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:56PM (#2959747)

From the perspective of a web searcher, a SERP with reviews for four [Buffalo Grove dentists] written by amateurs beats a SERP with zero reviews written by experts.

From the perspective of a large advertising firm, consistently replicating that at scale gives you a lot more inventory to sell.

One could say something similar regarding content farms and big daddy G.

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Re:Lone Yelp review dogs business owner by ddw on Sunday September 04, 2011 @01:14PM (#2959793)

I think they do things like filter out reviews from a user that has only posted one review, or if your name appears to be fake, etc. But who knows how exactly their algorithm works.

They're afraid of competitors leaving negative reviews for a business and there's probably something to that, but there's no transparency about it. And they've been doing the extortion thing for a while now: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/yelp-under-fire-from-...

I always thought it would be great if there was a Yelp for landlords - because landlords are rarely held accountable and it's not like you ask for references before you sign a lease - but there would probably be too many false reviews posted to make it work or tenants wouldn't feel comfortable speaking freely (because unfortunately tenants still need references). There's actually a website trying it, but doesn't seem like it's going anywhere right now: http://www.donotrent.com

Hopefully people will see Yelp for what it is: a small sample of the population that may be dissimilar to you writing probably biased reviews.

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Re:Lone Yelp review dogs business owner by ddw on Sunday September 04, 2011 @01:35PM (#2959850)

Why downvoted?

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Re:Lone Yelp review dogs business owner by pbreit on Sunday September 04, 2011 @01:04PM (#2959766)

Zagats is primarily crowdsourced.

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