Should Google give Yelp so much visibilty in its search results?
 

When searching Google for information about a place it seems Yelp is always staring me in the face and the star ratings displayed creates an instant subliminal bias.

I think Yelp can be a great resource for information but I don't like how they display the star rating on the search results page.

There are a lot of restaurants I enjoy that have a 3 or 3.5 on Yelp which is generally considered "bad". I no longer trust Yelp because a lot of the reviews seem to be written by self entitled, smug, pseudo intellectuals.

Why does Google suck yelp's dick so hard? Is it really necessary to show a bunch of amateur reviews for every damn business under the sun?

I hate that shit. If I'm looking up a phone number or address for a business that I'm already going to, I don't want to hear about how bad it is just by Googling the name..

Nope, but they give all these shity sites half the results now, its a fucking joke. The results sucked when ranks were plainly text links but this, this is horse shit.

Thats funny ive never been on yelp till you posted this

Exactly! I get anxiety from that shit :mad:

Yelp ranks because they have so many incoming links, they are an authority site; pure and simple.

Anyone that is paying attention will soon figure out that when it comes to restaurants the average reviewer is probably some broke college kid expecting the finest cuisine and service at Happy Meal prices.

reviews were solid for a while, nowadays, seems there are too many reviews by that sort described by the op. fakers.

have to sift through so much bullshit with all reviews these days. i was recently researching a guitar and reading the reviews of it, one dude said he bought the gold one, then later said he bought the red one, well, so much for that review. + very little they write is an actual review.

We also have to deal with the fact that writing fake favorable reviews is a huge thing now. A few years back these were easy to spot and obviously planted, now you have professional writers with lots of legit-sounding personas with a variety of writing styles/voices, who will pepper a couple minor flaws into otherwise positive reviews to sound realistic.

On the flipside, far as actual real reviews - people are much much more likely to take the time & write one up after a bad experience of course.

So yeah, the stars are mostly useless. IMO the only time I pay attention is when a place has 1 or 2 stars, usually those truly do suck.

whenever I see groupon / living Social etc mentioned I stop reading it. They are almost always bad.

Yelp and Google are likely business partners on some level. Stoppelman is one smart little dimwit. :winkwink:

They are always complaining about shitty service.

The funny thing about gugol and Matt Cutts is that in many of the Google Webmaster Videos, Matt Cutts is wearing a T-Shirt with "Report Spam"...

Basically telling us that people need to report spam or to help google...

And I can understand that they have no way to find out a spammy site automatically (besides the heavy and obvious spamming farm sites, that is), otherwise Matt Cutts would not ask people to report spam manually. And why would people do that anyway when google is not helping them at all?..