Yelp Founder Says "No Extortion — Just a Misunderstood Algorithm" 120
Early last year, a story in the East Bay Express reported that review site Yelp's ad sales force was using hardball tactics that amount to extortion — essentially, suggesting that negative reviews would remain prominent on the Yelp page for a particular restaurant or other business, unless the business bought advertising through Yelp, in which case Yelp could "do something" about the negative reviews. In a recent interview with the New York Times (the questions seem rather softball, but they do address this issue), Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman says it just isn't so, and blames unhappiness by business owners with the review site on the site's "automated and algorithmic" review-filtering system, which he describes as "counterintuitive." Stoppelman also says that Yelp's advertising salesmen have no connection to that filtering system, which doesn't quite answer the question of whether the salesmen claimed to be able to influence the reviews displayed, as some business owners allege. Updated 22:09 GMT by timothy: As reader AKMask points out below (now corrected above), that's the East Bay Express, rather than the East Bay Examiner.
This is not news. (Score:5, Informative)
Yelp has been bullshit for some time. It's a neat idea, but they've censored several of my negative reviews which were all factual.
As such, Yelp holds no value.
Re:Stoppelman doesn't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, he follows up with this:
The more that we explain about the algorithm, the less effective it becomes.
Doesn't Google does the same thing with their pagerank algorithm ?
When people know too much about the algorithm, they can game it.
Same reason why credit scoring company wont release their algorithms... Well, they might have further economic motives for that, but still if I knew exactly how the algorithm for my credit score worked, I could certainly dramatically improve my credit without doing anything that actually show I'm credit worthy...
East Bay EXPRESS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Experience shows that they most likely don't... (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe, or maybe not; Yelp's filter always shows reviews to their authors, even if hiding them from everyone else.
Highway robbery (Score:5, Informative)
Fuck Yelp and it's snobby yuppie fans.