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Comment by dhd415 | Hacker News Reader

Not specifically apropos of the buyout, but my experience with Angie's List has been similar to that of Yelp, that is, businesses that paid to advertise on AL were better able to maintain high rankings. The top-rated companies were not the best from either a quality or price perspective. While it's a great idea to crowd-source referrals for contractors like that, it's unfortunate that that model falls prey to the same impulse to increase revenue by soliciting advertising contracts with the firms that it purports to rank impartially.

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I think this is why TripAdvisor is better, in my experience, for restaurants than Yelp. If I'm not mistaken, TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals.

Foursquare is my secret weapon whenever I need to impress with restaurant selection.

I use 4sq & Swarm a bunch.

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.

Big fan of their SMS bot Marsbot as well if you haven't tried it yet. For some reason it's very low key and they don't promote it at all, but it's a pretty sweet product.

https://marsbotapp.com/

Same. Has worked well all over the world for me, small towns notwithstanding.

Foursquare was my favorite app ever, until they split it up into 4sq and swarm. then it became totally useless to me, and all of my friends slowly stopped using it. :/

I am just working on my own solution for myself, I gave up on foursquare and yelp.

I'm pretty sure TA does the same...

It does not! At least it did not 8 years ago when I worked there. Obviously a lot can change, but they realized the one competitive advantage they had that kept others out of the market was the huge catalog of user reviews.

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?

I don't work at TA, but I do own a tiny hotel in France so I deal with Booking.com and TA rather frequently -- TA does have a paid product for hotels, however other than not having my website URL and the ability for people to book directly with me on my TA profile, there has been absolutely zero difference in our visibility on TA. So far, TA has been really nice to work with despite me not paying them anything (yet.)

TA is definitely my go-to app when I go places; it is pretty good both as a consumer and as a listee.

I found TA invaluable for researching trips to Italy, Israel, and Costa Rica. You definitely have to use it carefully, and I verified with other sources, but there's a lot of good information there.

Citysearch has/had a huge database of reviews, too. Didn't keep anybody out of the market, thankfully.

Ranking on TripAdvisor is based only on review data, with more recent reviews carrying more weight as you'd expect. I work on this personally. Money has no influence whatsoever.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/n684/tripadv...

TripAdvisor does the same thing, businesses can even pay to "favorite" reviews which makes them appear at the top.

Those reviews are clearly labelled as such.

ANYTHING is better than Yelp. It literally does everything in the book to get you to download the app (to collect your user data, presumably) and is literally designed from the ground up to promote businesses that pay them to be higher on the index.

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

"and is literally designed from the ground up to promote businesses that pay them to be higher on the index."

This is false. Source: I worked there, on search. You cannot pay to rank higher in search.

Would I be in the wrong to call this a "canary"? As in you cannot pay to rank higher in search. But you can pay to have more exposure, better reviews, hidden bad reviews, etc.

Isn't that like... Google? (more exposure part)

This might be true technically but it's common knowledge that not paying will negatively affect perfectly good reviews. To the point that reviews that were ok while we paid aren't the instant we stop.

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.

"it's common knowledge that not paying will negatively affect perfectly good reviews"

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.

Except for the fact that you can be at the top of all search results by purchasing an ad. (SOURCE: Opened yelp in browser on mobile amd searched for coffee in SF)

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)

in search being the keyword

ads from paying businesses list higher than search results; this effectively means you pay to be "indexed" higher

no, it doesn't. it means that ads appear on search pages. just like every other search engine on the internet.

The audiences are a little different. TripAdvisor is easier to game, I find it a good guide, but there are definitely false positives. TA is very accurate for shitty restaurants.

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.)

TripAdvisor recommendations get dated fast and are only for a niche audience. In my experience they tend to stick to the most popular places rather than the best places, and they miss a lot of local spots / dive-y spots / places that families wouldn't go etc.

In cities like SF, NYC, etc, I've had much better luck with recommendations from Foursquare and Yelp. Especially with new places.

> TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals

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.

This will always be true for any subjective rating system, i.e. stars, upvotes, etc.

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.

> 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.

You preferences aren't the mean or the median, I suspect.

So? The point is everyone can filter according to their preferences, not according to some point system which in the end signifies nothing at all.

I'm definitely with you on having better categorization and classification and filtering options.

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.

[1]: http://mashable.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-folds/

Anybody use here use Oink? How as it? Very interested in this level of granularity for restaurants. Nobody really doing this well.

I am trying, its just a side project at this point.

I have never heard of it, but I am still going to pursue this space.

> 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.

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.

If you're ever in Raleigh, NC, you'll find the best Mediterranean (specifically Lebanese) at Neomonde/Sitti/Sassool (they are all owned by the same family[1]). In my mind, Neomonde is a local treasure.

[1] http://www.neomonde.com/retail/about-us/

I have a solution I am working on that might interest you.

I've found my towns local facebook group to be the go to place for recommendations.

Interesting. I haven't even thought to look for reviews on Facebook. I have found nextdoor.com useful for finding service professionals.

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. :-)

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