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Earlier this week, Kathleen Richards of the East Bay Express published an article titled: Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0. The main point of the rather scathing article is that Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of businesses on its website, but for a price.
Jeremy Stoppelman, the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, posted a rebuttal on the Yelp Official Blog: Kathleen Richards – East Bay Express and several followup posts as well (see the Yelp Blog for more).
Now normally, such blog banter wouldn’t hit my radar and even if it did, I would usually ignore it. However, the Yelp story hit a nerve and prompted me to post about why I am a little dubious of Yelp.
In December 2006, I had a bad experience at a local business (Tea Time at 542 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA 94301). I posted a review on Yelp. Here is the full text of the review:
Palo Alto, CA
1 star rating
Yikes! I’m so surprised to see the other reviews for this place on Yelp. Here’s why:
Three of us were meeting for a business meeting at Coupa Cafe at 10:30 AM. Coupa happened to be very crowded and so we decided, hey, why not go next door to Tea Time since it was empty. And I mean empty, there were no customers there at all.
We go into Tea Time and find a place to sit. Turns out all the power outlets happened to be along the wall where there was only seating for two. There being three of us, we pulled up a extra table and chair, ordered a pot of tea and sat down do chat and do a demo.
A couple of minutes later, the guy running the store (apparently not the owner) comes by and tells us they “we’re not allowed to change their seating configuration because they have all these other customers that they need to accommodate”. May I remind you that we were the ONLY customers in the store at the time
We told him we would put things back in their position when we leave, but he insisted that he had to put the chairs back in their position right away. So we told him to give us our money back first and merrily went on our way to one of the several other great places Palo Alto has to offer.
What amazes me is how someone can be so silly as to piss off their only customers in the store and that too to make sure they can keep their chairs in the right position!
So we obviously have the worst possible opinion of this place and I bet that their lack of attention to customer needs will render them out of business soon. Afterall, this is the Valley — lots of people go to cafe’s to plug in, get on the net and talk shop, the beverages/deserts are often the perks which come as side effect. So here’s wishing all the best to the guy/gal who owns this place — they’ve still got a lot of learning to do about how to run a business.
I posted the review and then also emailed a copy to my cohorts who were with me. A while later, when I visited Yelp, I figured I would check to see if my review was still there. I was shocked to find that when I looked through all the reviews for Tea Time, my review, with its 1 star rating was no where to be found.
A little further digging today, right before writing this post, showed that the negative review I wrote only shows up when I am logged in to my Yelp account. When I log in to my Yelp account, Tea Time has 47 reviews. However, when I visit the site in another browser, without logging in to my account, it only shows 46 reviews.
Now I’m not an avid “yelper”. This was the one time I felt that my experience with a local business was bad enough to warrant taking the time to write a review on Yelp about it. The fact that the review doesn’t show up for anyone except for me, seems to suggest something that needs further review. Jeremy has written about their black-box algorithm, but I can see how and why an algorithm should be used to compute the final ranking for a business. However, removing a full review, which is the raw data, seems inappropriate to me.
I would be perfectly okay with allowing the business to rebut the review given by a particular user and and if a business takes the time to do so, perhaps it should reduce the weight assigned to the review accordingly. However, I think it is inappropriate to not show or remove a review.
I am perfectly willing to give Yelp the benefit of the doubt here. They have a great site and I use it often to check reviews (but don’t write many). But my faith and trust in Yelp’s site would be considerably higher if I the one review I took the time to post, would actually show up on their site. If they have a rational explanation, I’m all ears and would welcome a response in the comments.
February 22nd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful post. The reason your review is not shown on the business page publicly is (for better or worse) our best attempt to make sure that the reviews on this businesses page reflect objective, unbiased, consumer opinions.
We decided early on that Yelp wasn’t going to be another anonymous review site where everyone is given credibility whether they’ve earned it or not. We created an automated system that decides how much trust to instill in a particular reviewer. If the reviewer isn’t involved with Yelp it’s awful hard for our software to have much confidence in the reviewer and so it may not show that review (as is the case here).
While this is may seem unfair to you it’s a great relief to a business owner that is targeted by a competitor with a fake review. Or to a consumer who may be tempted to trust a fake review written by a business. It’s worth mentioning your review is always in your personal profile which is still publicly posted and therefore publicly visible.
Happy to discuss further, feel free to ping me at jeremy.yelp.com . Figuring out how to communicate and solve these tricky spam issues is a priority for me and Yelp.
February 22nd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
@Jeremy, Yelp CEO: Jeremy, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to respond to my post. I appreciate your well worded response and acknowledge the danger to business owners from fake reviews.
I guess this brings up the issue of identity and credibility. Even though I posted the review using my real name and identity, there is presently no good way for Yelp to be able to know that and use that in its algorithm. I think that is an area that is ripe for innovation — both in establishing an authority for identity (at one point Network Solutions/Verisign used to hand out certificates for individuals, perhaps they still do) and for the ranking algorithms that get used once there is good identity/credibility data.
I am not a fan of anonymous review sites either, and I believe that if one has something to say, then they should also have the gumption to stand behind it. And if necessary, the humility to acknowledge when you’re wrong. So I will be the first to acknowledge that I was wrong in doubting Yelp, and your response has gone far in restoring Yelp’s credibility for me.
I guess now it’s my turn to establish my credibility on Yelp by posting more reviews
November 14th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I submitted a positive yelp review about about a salon I had recently visited. Yelp said it posted my review and it only shows the review if Im logged. I think its shady that yelp only posts what reviews they like. I thought that this was freedom of speech. A lot of people that I have spoken to have had the same problem with YELP…Shady
January 20th, 2010 at 6:54 am
…I am afraid Yelp has no credability as far as I am concerned – They are essentailly the “Fox News” of web review sites.
I have also had Yelp reviews totally deleted, and others that disappear unless I am logged in.
The reason I love sites like apartment.ratings dot com, among others, is that I can see negative as well as positive reviews, and I can BE THE JUDGE of the integrity of the reviewer. I do not need my reviews to be pre-digested for me.
And, of course, I am suspicious of any business that has 100% positive reviews – my goodness, it must be run by Nother Theresa!
Goodbye, Yelp.
March 19th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Same thing – my posts only appear when I am logged on – I don’t only post bad reviews either – gave a glowing review of a restaurant in Auburn, NY and unfortunately it’s not in the “public” view – what a joke yelp is! I won’t be using it for my research of businesses any more now that I realize how slighted the information!
March 24th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
I have the same problem with Yelp. My review only appears when I am logged in. If I am not logged in it does not appear. This is very shady? Why is Yelp trying to fool me into thinking my review has been posted? I suspect that they are getting a payoff from the company (ie. sponsorship or advertising).
I don’t trust Yelp, and I won’t be using it in the future.
July 15th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
It is true. Yelp is not honest! I had bad experience with Japanese Beetle Inc. They ripped me off $440 for a regular car checkup. I posted 1 star review which was filtered it wasn’t included in the ratings.
I went to this place, because of great reviews in the first place. Thus Yelp collaborated in this scam!
What significance it makes how many reviews one already wrote? If the review is FACTUAL and not purely perception – it is genuine in my book. I can’t care less about professional pitchers who wrote 1000 reviews. Yelp MUST go!
July 28th, 2010 at 10:04 am
Yeah. I just discovered my reviews both positive and nagative are not showing. What is the point in wasting my time on this site when I can post a review on another site or a blog and see it. I’ll never go on Yelp again. What a great idea I thought Yelp was, but once again, idiots prevail. If someone is going to take the time to write a review, then most of the time there is a good reason for it.Most people have better things to do with their time. I will not waste anymore of mine on Yelp.