In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator).
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
> They care if a receipt was generated by the machine, and are a check on the employee.
Aren't receipts used to track the store's revenue, as in the numbers reported to your local tax agency?
As far as I know, it's common for cashiers to have a daily/weekly/monthly slack value that they are allowed to report as a difference between the number reported by cash registers and the amount of cash delivered, because SNAFUs do happen during a day's work.
This could be stored on a computer now, though. But numbers can be fudged.
Taiwan had an interesting way around this with a receipt lottery. Ask for a receipt, it has a number on it that enters you in a lottery. Presumably the generation of this number means the sale was reported.
It is pretty important to do mid-shift counts randomly as well. A common scam is for the cashier to ring no sale if the total is an easy price, say $2 for a coffee. Then mid shift the register will have extra money which would have been pocketed at the end of the shift. If there is too much money in the register, the employee is skimming.
In the US, the govt outlawed the software contracting industry in the 80s because they suspected people weren't reporting their earnings when they filed their taxes. forcing everyone to become employees of companies that were better monitored. I suspect the same motivation is partly behind the attempts to eliminate other kinds of gig work now.
A few people seemed to have missed an important step in the argument:
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
"The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark."
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
I find it fascinating when someone finds a historical parallel to a situation that we think is novel and unprecedented, reminding us that nothing is truly new, and it's not as bad as we think.
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
I would say there's no moral difference between a human operator and a mechanical operator whose behavior is controlled by a human. Configuring the operator to drop calls from a particular area code would be an example in the case you provided.
Sure. It just used to be harder to build in, and to do so precisely. In your example, dropping calls from an area code, that's a relatively coarse filter.
There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black poor people in buses could not [1, p123].
These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
>These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confront the biases that we have and try and build ways to expose biases we don't even realize we have.
This is obviously quite hard and if I had a solution to it I'd probably be implementing it instead of waxing poetic on HN.
> And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
It's even worse than that, because it's so hard to tell if this is even happening.
Suppose guidance counselors in predominantly black schools are telling kids to focus on athletics and the ones in predominantly white schools tell them to focus on intellectual extracurriculars. Then a resume parser sorts people with athletics listed into physical jobs and people with intellectual pursuits listed into intellectual jobs, which of course results in the black applicants getting callbacks for the lower paying jobs.
This is pretty clearly the guidance counselors causing the disparity rather than the algorithm, but we only know that because it was stipulated in the hypothetical. In real life you may not have enough data to be able to discern the underlying cause. In other words, you don't know what the baseline racial disparity is based on all of the non-racial factors that correlate with race, so you don't know if the problem is in the algorithm or was caused somewhere upstream and the algorithm is only producing the accurate outputs for its inputs.
In theory you can evaluate this by checking up on how the candidates hired do compared to how the algorithm predicted they would do, but that's a noisy signal (what does "doing well" mean?), you might not have a large enough sample size to get meaningful results, and it has a lag time of potentially several years, by which point you may already be using a different algorithm. It's a hard problem.
you bring up a really good point. There's correlation and causation. Root cause analysis is really hard and rarely do the results align with simple politics because humans are complex beings in complex relationships.
"Mechanical honesty" worked because it was much harder to have automated "if statement" mechanisms with non-electronic machinery. And then electronic computers made it much, much easier.
Can you elaborate more on (or give an example of) "mechanical honesty"? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem unfeasible to implement biases in mechanical systems (especially government departments!), but I haven't given it a lot of thought.
It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book.
Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough.
One could argue that Google has been exploiting this since the creation of AdWords: they will happily sell the right to advertise on a search for your exact company name to a competitor, a nice income stream which verges on extortion.
It's even possible to deliver personalized dishonest results; applications including search engines know who you are, and can lie to you and only you.
It's certainly possible to be 'mechanically dishonest', but no question that contemporary technology makes it easier and more lucrative.
Another example is targeting job ads to particular demographics. You can put out an ad that only white men between the ages of 22 and 30 who come from an upper class background will see. And women, minorities and people from poor backgrounds, not only won't see them, they won't know they exist.
I don't think Yelp has done anything other than "lie in the phone book" so far, so it's a bad example.
A better example might be where Uber made their app turn off a bunch of shady privacy a violating settings, but only if the phone was geographically located at Apple HQ.
SSL certificates, which require you to trust someone you’ve never met with the entirety of your digital life. From your social connections to your bank account and everything in between, you’re putting your faith not only in their honesty, but in their ability to limit mistakes.
Not that there’s a better solution yet, but technical solutions like SSL certificates still boil down to trust, and in whom you place your.
This is also true for your computer hardware, the software you run, the medicines you take, the food you eat, the water you drink...
I guess my point is that that human trust is so pervasive and fundamental that there are diminishing returns to eliminating it.
What will always remain in style I think is accountability. So trust, but have supply chain integrity such that you know who it is that you're trusting and who is responsible when things go wrong.
> exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty"
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though:
Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system.
In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables).
In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.
SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out.
For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank.
In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.
Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created.
> In the old days we had paid search engines
I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.
Google is so entwined with the web that they've changed how people interact with and publish content.
Deep browsing sessions through layers of hyperlinks are dead. Instead people jump into and out of pages from Google, Twitter or HN. Personal home pages are dead, instead you need to publish to a platform like Medium or Twitter which will promote your content for you because no one is browsing anymore.
Now we have a world where the web pages primarily about companies (not individuals) create pages for Google (not people) as a way of juicing the search rankings so they can then get people in to download their mobile app.
In a nostalgic way, I miss the old web. But in a more pragmatic way I'm appalled at how inefficient this system is. If you wanted to design a way to index the world's information from the ground up, using toil and SEO spend as a proxy for quality and legitimacy (i.e. a million keyword heavy custom landing pages and bought backlinks) is a terrible way to do it.
It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web.
Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet.
I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Facebook as the internet to the point its where they consume most of their information.
I screamed about all this when Google became an ad machine. I screamed about it when Microsoft released paid DLC for the Xbox 360. Some of us railed, but the children...the children grew up thinking it was all normal and now its just 'how the world is' (SAAS/advertising/misinformation)
That's the real danger here. Companies outlast us and mold the next generation to see them as Deities of the world wide web.
Also- I do not remember paid search engines either.
Google certainly didn't create SEO. In fact their original search engine was notable because the SEO companies had not figured it out and for a couple of years the results were head and shoulders above competitors like Altavista and Ask Jeeves.
The only search engine that wasn't ruined by SEO was Archie. It was ruined by everybody shutting down their FTP sites.
Ah, Archie! I remember the joys of trying to find something by searching for filenames. 'Course, I was young enough back then that the idea that there were servers with stuff I could download made it fun enough to do it, and spelunk around the FTP site. I still remember a few common servers, like ftp.funet.fi. I don't have any idea what university it is, but I have a soft spot for Finland because of it. (That and being a child in Minnesota.)
I would prefer it if it was not necessary to learn "how to use Google". AMP makes that even more necessary than it used to be. I would prefer it if Google faced more real competition (DDG as I understand it is still fundamentally riding on the back of other lesser-used engines).
But "fundamentally broken" is hyperbole.
I think that "Deities" is also hyperbole. The people under 40 that I know regard Google as a corporation that does useful stuff, sometimes almost as if by magic, but not godlike.
I vaguely recall paying something like $20 for that back in the day. It's not technically a paid search engine I guess, but I wonder what the effect would be currently if there were some type of nominal fee required for all search placement. I think it would make it more difficult to generate massive amounts of blogspam.
You have it exactly backwards on several levels. Google has been fighting an arms race for decades against antisocial SEO. Google doesn't want people doing that at all both because of user experience and because they already sell the top slots as ads! SEO is a way to try to "cheap out" and get attention without continous ad spending and keyword selections. SEO existed before Google was ascendant - remember keyword peppering on irrelevant pages to get clicks on altavista and askjeeves?
If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?
You sound like you might not have been using search engines before Google, because SEO predates Google by... well since the invention of the search engine. People were gaming Yahoo, AltaVista, etc and selling their services to do so long before PageRank was a thing.
People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect.
Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.
I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.
> Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good.
Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.
Yep. There are multiple companies that build those blogs en masse. It's called Content Marketing. Those companies are always on the lookout for popular keywords (they use SEMrush, MOZ, etc) so they can build extremely shallow 1000-word blog posts around them for their customers.
They pay peanuts to freelancing writers that don't know much about the subject, and the only "references" they give for the article is from Wikipedia and other similar blog posts. Since some of those companies have control over thousands of (seemingly unconnected) customer blogs, they can link from one blog to another (and from social networks) to increase their PageRank score.
Some of the larger ones are even starting to employ machine learning to write articles, so expect even less quality from now on.
And Google doesn't care for one simple reason: search keywords captured by Content Marketing blogs are worth way more as AdWords.
It’s gotten to a point where for some topics I don’t even regard ‘the internet’ as a realistic source for information. Which is a tragedy, because it used to be. Almost anything related to health or medical topics, or consumer electronics is so inundated with blog spam that the signal to noise ratio is just too low to be useful. So many times I find myself 1/4 the way down an ‘article’ about a topic only to realize it’s nothing but regurgitated ‘content marketing’ spam.
Yes, I've been saying for years that there's a fundamental contradiction in the paid search model. If the best content moves to the top organically, it doesn't need to pay, so only the not-best content will pay, which degrades search results. So, Google has perverse incentive to put the best content not at the top so it can force them to pay go get to the top. (The same dynamic applies on FB feeds, although the definition of "best" there is fuzzier.)
The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.
SEO is a racket. Google controls >90% of the search engine market, globally.
That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open.
The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures.
Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right.
If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.
Hypothetically, what happens when the answerer wrongly replies "Yes"? The yes would indicate "yes, that is the restaurant your order will goto" but what's next?
I suppose, _hypothetically_, if you were a restaurant owner and didn't violate audio recording laws, and you got this, you'd have a good case against Yelp for fraud or dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.
> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.
Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
Suppose I pay a marketing firm money to run an advertising campaign to promote my business. They wouldn't be violating any laws by using my trademarks as part of doing this job, according to the contract we signed.
That is what Grubhub claims they are doing. They aren't doing this to random third-parties - just restaurants that signed up with Grubhub's marketing service and agreed to allow them to do these things in their terms of service. Unfortunately, in this world of EULAs that are far too numerous to ever read and understand, most of the restaurants didn't realize what they were signing up for.
This behavior absolutely scummy, but the question of whether it is legal is more of a contract issue than a trademark one.
I was once told in the some countries you're not allowed to mention your competitor directly in an ad. No idea if it's true. At first I thought it was a bad idea but maybe not?
Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website.
If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.
It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.
The restaurants we typically order from (all 3-5 of them), the first hit on google is an organic search result for that restaurant. No ads even. In some cases, it's the first two organic results (a main website, and then a direct link to their menu on that same website, which for some reason shows up as two different organic search results - I don't even mean sitelinks or the new indented stuff, I mean full on bona fide second organic search result for the same domain).
The only one that I usually order from for which this isn't the case doesn't actually have their own website.
So in some cases this is working.
What doesn't work for me is searching for the type of food - that's all aggregator sites.
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives
They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.
What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
> Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
On desktop, maybe.
Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now:
I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App" and "Continue to mobile site." I say ostensibly, because I don't get the chance to choose before a second tab opens up with a strange URL that causes iOS to open up the app store to their app.
I close the app store and go back to Safari and click "continue to mobile site". There are some results listed. I click "map".
Yelp asks me for my location. I allow it. It shows me results for San Francisco. I'm about 30 miles away on the peninsula. Now, I know I searched for San Francisco, and maybe that's what I want. But then what is Yelp even doing with my location?
At the bottom is an add for their iOS App. I click "x" to close it. Nothing happens. After four clicks, it finally leaves.
I click "Filters", select "Open Now" and submit.
Yelp asks for my location again. I allow it. It now shows me the results that are open, still ranging from SF to Colma. (So again, I have no idea what they're doing with my location.)
I click on a result. In this case, Golden Boy Pizza. I click on a photo. I scroll a few photos. On the sixth photo, I am presented the option of viewing all 3427 photos ...in the app.
I scroll down to look at reviews. Oh, those stars aren't reviews for this restaurant. They're sponsored suggestions. I scroll down further. I click a review that looks interesting because I want to read the whole thing.
...it takes me back to the app store without even a prompt.
---
So, yeah, it's technically 'trivial' in the sense that you can get a list. But to actually use that list, you have to worry if any random click is going to take you away from the website. Some of the information you want is completely inaccessible without installing their software. (And even if you go through it all, there's no guarantee Yelp's information is current either.) Even if I trusted Yelp, I'd rather use any other method to find a pizza place.
That experience sucks and I totally hate it as well.
FWIW, for Google Maps, Youtube, etc. if you don't want them to try to open the app browse them in an incognito tab (I use Chrome so I don't know if Safari does the same thing in a "private tab") but I'm just guessing the thinking is, in a private tab, auto launching apps would defeat your privacy so it doesn't happen. I didn't try that with the Yelp app. I don't use Yelp at all. There are more reviews on Google Maps for most of the places I visit (not the USA)
You're assuming that Google's algorithm treats a small restaurant website and a site like Seamless equally based on the same SEO ranking factors. That assumption ignores some important factors;
- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.
- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.
- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.
- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.
It's actually Google and Bing that are winning. Everyone else is losing to various degrees.
"SEO" depends on a wide array of factors, such as mobile-friendliness and a semantic link structure. But what ultimately ends up winning are established domains with tons of indexable pages. Backlinks matter, but the difference is negligible for sites that operate on the scale of Yelp.
If an aggregator's page appears before yours on the organic search results, your only choice is to pay Google or Bing to put your listing at the top.
If you are a random restaurant, your 3-page website is never going to beat Yelp.
perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it
The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.
I've seen something like this play out twice already. The first round was quite some years back with Facebook pages beating the restaurants' own websites. Facebook's SEO was so much better than the average website that many businesses, including restaurants, eventually gave up and just put everything on Facebook.
The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link.
In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).
Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
For me, the shady business practices are not the reason I don't use Yelp. The big problem is that people are bad at reviewing restaurants. Everyone has different assumptions and standards, so the rating is generally meaningless. I see things like "1 Star. Server gave me a dirty look after I didn't tip them, because I don't believe in tipping." In cases like that, the problem is you, not the restaurant! For things as subjective as whether or not the food was worth the price, you have to provide supporting evidence ("show, don't tell"), and while professional reviewers do this, amateur reviewers never do. There is no way to use the data to make a good decision, and it seems even less possible to use the data to decide "which restaurant should I go to right now".
To some extent, all reviews are like this. I cringe when tech reviewers measure WiFi routers and tell me about throughput (that comes at the cost of latency), or Amazon reviewers bought the completely wrong product and obviously didn't like it.
I hate to say it, but I don't think reviews are "a thing". They make people feel good and probably drive more sales ("it had 5 stars, so I bought it"), but I don't feel like reviews have ever saved me time. I wish I could stop seeing them. (Maybe I should write a Chrome extension to remove them.)
This was a solved problem. Professional restaurant reviewing guides generally had reputable practices for decades. Those came to exist because "your" dumb uncle always recommended the worst restaurants. So the internet comes along and tells everyone's uncle and their uncles terrible friends that their review is super special. Voila we have yelp and google maps which are generally a combination of super fans or just terrible people with the 100 normal people that visit a restaurant each day completely absent. Hooray outliers!!!!!!
Yeah...this is pretty much spot on. I know at least a half dozen people, who I have been to multiple restaurants with, who I personally don't think have actual taste buds who are quite proud of having hundreds if not thousands of reviews on Yelp. The 'game' aspect becomes the point, not the review itself.
This. This is an immediate disqualification for me using a site. Maybe I'll use your app, at some point, if I find it provides some wildly more useful experience for me. But if all you are doing is hammering me to download your app on first encounter so you can 'monetize' or 'capture' me or whatever slimy marketing euphemism is in vouge this week for 'invasion of privacy', I will expend extra effort to find any alternative to your site.
It's only worthy of seeing pictures of food to gauge portion sizes imo. Sometimes I want to know if the restaurant is one to leave me hungry after spending $14 or feed me lunch twice.
My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is.
While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.
90% of the time, I ask someone. A real person. Apps are probably never going to be the answer unless something drastic changes, because the app developers have proven over and over they're more interested in maximizing revenue at all cost, not delivering me a good experience. And the "social media"/gamification of the user community is full of perverse incentives resulting in nothing you can trust.
Try it? Go spend 20$ some time at a place that looks good. If it meets your expectations then great, otherwise go somewhere else next time.
You'll either run out of places to try, meet your novelty needs by never running out if you live in a giant city, or get enough regular places to not care anymore
Zagat does have much better quality, but I can't imagine how they could scale it to cover more than a tiny fraction of most major cities (much less smaller communities) since it relies very much on very high quality, selected reviewers. One can dream, though.
Another generally good place is if you have an alt weekly newspaper (paper or on-line), such as Creative Loafing. I've had a lot of luck with their reviews. I'll check these if I'm going to a city I don't have local contacts.
Same. Haven't heard anything bad about this in particular, though the scores seem quite inflated so you want to see at least a 4.x around here to bother reading the review text in most cases.
I believe it's the wider SV business model of 'platformization' that eventually gives rise to these types of mafia tactics as you say.
It was never going to be enough for Yelp's investors for them to simply replace the physical Yellow Pages. To monetize (sell ads), they had to be the start and end point for every customer in their search for a local business. That's why they started harassing you to download the app or set up an account if you opened a page on your phone; to build a base of users who'd open the app first, and not a search engine or something to look up a location.
Now that the restaurant and personal services industry is dependent on having a positive Yelp presence, Yelp appears to be pressing their advantage further by becoming a middleman, taking a cut of every deal made on 'their' platform.
"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it's really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over.
Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same.
Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
This is something important that a lot of people miss when discussing unethical actions by corporations. It would be foolish from the perspective of Yelp or Google to not exploit the massive power differential here, so of course they will. It isn't a matter of morals, morals don't talk. Money does.
Competition, fairness, and freedom are not free, they have to be defended adaptively against stuff like this.
If users would hit yelp.com and searched for a restaurant and somehow google intercepted that then they'd be a parasite. The way I see it it is a symbiotic somewhat relationship, at least in theory. Yelp is a parasite on businesses though, they attempt to extort money and give no value in exchange, often times unsuccessfully. Here's an older anecdote I posted about yelp [0]
While there are definitely anecdotes about this kind of behavior, I have yet to see evidence of systemic or corporate-sponsored effort to do this. I believe this is more a question of possibly poorly-incentivized sales people rather than an intentional strategy on behalf of Yelp. I think this is backed up by a number of lawsuits that haven't gone anywhere. I might be mistaken; if there is a source showing this is really systemic, I'd be very interested.
Either way, Google now does many of the same things that Yelp does (reviews, photos, metadata management) - but it doesn't really care about the space, apart from being good enough to beat its competition. While today maybe they're motivated to build better products to compete with Yelp for eyeballs, overtime I think this means the reviews space will stagnate. That's unfortunate.
I think this is the core Google problem: They have so much top-of-funnel traffic that they just have to do things "good enough" to crush entire industries of competition. The bar to be sufficiently better enough than "good enough" to build a meaningful competitor to G in any vertical is so high it stops many potential competitors from even trying. The only companies that manage it are ones that have entirely different & massive profitable business models like Apple.
Everywhere Google is, the sector stagnates: Search! RSS readers (with a bit of a renaissance since Google Reader died). Email. Calendars. News lists. Increasingly, reviews. Fortunately MSFT pushes them in docs and hopefully Apple continues to do so in Maps and browsers.
I'm in no way defending anything google here, I was just stating that Yelp if as bad is not worse than google (as they are more desperate for revenue). And I have no incentive to lie, the anecdote was something that happened to a close friend of mine and know what kind of distress it caused. I have no idea if their corporate strategy is to " extort ", but from noticing other incidents they're not too far off. Their actions like the actions of other big corps are absolutely abusive.
I will have to do some searching to grab a screen cap, but I can tell you that Yelp explicitly advertised a paid "feature" to small businesses like mine to hide competitors from top search results in exchange for a fee. I don't know that empirical proof of systemic abusive behavior and antitrust violations would necessarily be useful here. They are clearly employing tactics that actively damage open competition and informed consumer choice, and even anecdotal evidence of that is justification for regulatory movement to stop it.
Yelp can easily expose businesses to people who are more likely to give bad reviews too.
I mean they collect this data on every profile - some reviewers have a TON of 1 star reviews. Hide the restaurants that pay and increase exposure of those that don’t to these reviewers to get them to give poor ratings.
Obviously there is no way to prove this, but it would be a great way to get people to pay while still maintaining plausible deniability. After all, the one star reviewers still have to go to the establishment and have their bad experience.
Out of principle I trust Google more than Yelp as they're less incentivized to extort small businesses. Also companies that cripple their mobile site (while having a functional desktop site) to force an app download deserve everything bad that happens to them
> The Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me.
At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
"$10 off your next service if you give us a review on Yelp" is just the tip of an iceberg of complaints people have about online review systems, including Yelp.
I was once traveling and some friends found a highly reviewed place on Yelp. When we got there it turned out the glowing reviews were all written by the owner's son. At least he felt bad enough about it to give us free dessert.
> Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game
I assume you mean it's among the hardest to game except by paying Yelp to remove negative reviews - that's a pretty important caveat when it comes to trustworthiness.
I'm almost entirely de-Googled at this point, but I make an exception specifically to avoid Yelp, which somehow manages to be even worse than Google within its niche.
I typically search for things "-yelp". They're an annoying and mostly useless.
I haven't bothered to look in a long time, but the reviews I've seen are obviously bad. I can find menus on the restaurant's real page. The locality views are worse than, say, Apple maps. There's just no reason to use them.
Add in that they harm the livelihood of restaurants owned by people I like, and yeah, they're another crap site that continues to be annoying by trying to get in between me and someone who wants to feed me.
Completely disagree. Reviews generated by "give a good review and we'll give you a prize" and "I'd hate to see you hit with a bunch of bad reviews because you didn't pay us more money" are completely worthless and are the core of Yelps business model. It's the definition of easy-to-game and untrustworthy.
Hardest to game is like lesser evils. Lesser evils remain evil, as hard games remain played.
I personally value direct interactions with people I do business with more than ever in my life. Too many middle companies all working some angle to make more than the value they may actually deliver.
Well, a few things:
Trust in all this kind of service is reaching a low ebb. We keep finding incidents where the behavior is not as represented.
Frankly, the money might be too good.
And that's fine. Is what it is, people do what they do
I am stepping back, reevaluating these kinds of value propositions, and recommending peers do the same.
As far as I recall, Yelp predates Google having any of those features at all.
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
Yelp as a social network is actually pretty cool, if you get their elite status for the year you get invited to some pretty fun free events, and I know they've done socially distanced ones since the pandemic, I heard about a murder mystery somewhere. Now that I don't participate in that I don't really use the platform often.
We drove up the Oregon coast and my GF used Yelp to find good places for us to stop and eat. I was frankly astonished as, like you, I've found Yelp pretty useless at best.
There was an xkcd about this, but i've found anything below 4.5 stars is mediocre. Above that you find a better probability of a good meal, but it's still just a probability.
I find it servers as a good filter for the awful stuff, which is what I really care about when travelling.
I have a friend who has run a restaurant for decades with a customer base that is almost entirely regulars. She has encouraged us to leave bad yelp reviews as she has found "yelpers" (different from people who simply consult yelp) to be a pain in the neck...plus wants space to be available for the regulars.
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
They - Grubhub not Yelp - record every phone call, as the article points out, and even make it available to the restaurants, with personal details censored (unless of course their algorithms fuck up, and it does fuck up).
So chances are if you ever called via Yelp into one of such Grubhub numbers, they got at least your voice and your food preferences (which might include medical/dietary needs) on record, maybe even your full details and CC number etc (depending on the quality of their automated censoring algorithms and on whether or not they store the original unredacted calls as well).
“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”, as their phone robot tells you :P
The bill would make more sense if it was against companies like Yelp misleading both customers and restaurants that they are calling eachother directly.
i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless.
edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
I can give you a case in point: we just tried to order Thai on Saturday from one of our favorite restaurants. They were short staffed in the kitchen and the wait time was over an hour... so we didn't order. I'm willing to bet a ton of other people did the same thing. Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
> Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
They don’t, unless they agreed to those terms with the entity charging them. For example, if the agreement was to pay Yelp for all phone calls coming from Yelp’s website.
That's a little disingenuous. They don't HAVE to pay for those calls, but if Yelp's system decides an order took place then they get charged for the call. Based on some experimenting done recently by a podcast I listen to (can't remember which one right now), that decision boils down to "if the call was longer than 45 seconds and food was discussed, then an order took place". It's then up to the restaurant owner to reconcile and dispute any charged calls that didn't end in a sale. That means listening to the recording of every call that was charged and requesting a refund for each one that didn't end in an order.
Yeah, but if they're lying they'd lie on the high end, not the low end. If it's actually 99%, they'd say 99.999%. If it's actually 10%, they'd say 35%.
It seems unlikely that there is a large contingent of people who Google a restaurant (which they must be doing in order to get Yelp's number), ignore the listing of hours right next to the number and call the restaurant to get the hours. I believe it happens, but I have a hard time believing that particular sequence of events accounts for even one call in 50.
To clarify: You're saying you do this more often than you order takeout? Especially during Covid? Because I explicitly said I believe it happens, just that it's a minority of calls.
When I order from a local restaurant, I want THEM to get my money, not somebody in sili valley.
Yelp skims using this man-in-the-middle attack on the restaurant's telephones. (Payment card companies skim too, but there's a lot of competition in that field so it's under control.)
Yelp might argue that I, the purchaser, am not hurt by their shenanigans, so I shouldn't worry about it. But, on the contrary, I am hurt when my local restaurants have their margins shaved. Several have had to close their doors in my neighborhood. How am I hurt? For one thing I like the restaurants that closed. For another, I have neighbors and friends among restaurant owners and workers. For a third, some of my tax and charity money goes to helping unemployed people.
AT THE VERY LEAST Yelp's recorded announcement ("awesomeness???") should inform me that I'm going through a third party.
My local telco just delivered a printed Yellow Pages book for the first time in many years. I'm going to use it. I'm going to keep the takeout menus I get.
I wonder if this can be called "wire fraud" in some new telecom regulations?
When 2 extortionists (Yelp and Grubhub) meet, what you get is extortion 2.0.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
When the post dot-com wave of consumer companies arrived, they found a market that was more likely to trust them - the scrappy underdog - than the big, evil corporation. They were a breath of fresh air. A needed change in a stale ecosystem.
Jon Favreau said he based Iron Man off of Elon Musk. Tech was cool. And more importantly trusted.
And then Yelp & co arrived. Uber at least had the decency to start out by screwing over the competition. They did their best to avoid screwing over the customers. But Yelp? Yelp doesn't give a fuck.
They're ratfuckers to the core, and they'll torch everyone and everything if it helps them get a quarterly bonus.
This article really buries the lede, that all of these restaurants agreed to pay GrubHub for any leads that GrubHub generated. Sounds like the restaurants should simply stop buying GrubHub’s marketing service, if it isn’t worthwhile for them.
It's a prisoner's dilemma. If a company like GrubHub decides they're going to build a demand aggregation platform for a certain market segment, part of that is going to include significant advertising to acquire users (demand). They'll also offer a good (or great) looking deal to vendors (supply).
So, if you're a vendor, the appeal of early adoption is huge. You get access to a platform with a bunch of free advertising and a built in set of potential customers. The platform might let you reduce costs (shut down your website) and, as an early adopter, a lot of those potential customers become your customers in the short term.
Then, as vendors keep joining the platform, it becomes de facto market for those goods. That's the point where the demand aggregation has succeeded and the vendors get converted into a commodity. Customers want a class of product, not a specific product.
So now, you _must_ be on the platform to succeed even if you hate it and you're just another cog in supply side of the system, The company (like GrubHub) that successfully aggregated demand can rent seek for as long as they maintain the demand monopoly and there's nothing a single vendor can do about it.
Get used to it because every industry susceptible to demand aggregation is going to look like the food industry soon IMO.
The "marketing service" just means being listed at all on GrubHub itself. So restaurant owners are agreeing to a big fee to get customers from the GrubHub website and app.
But it sounds like they often don't know that they are also being made to pay a fee for their own customers who are simply looking up the phone number.
GrubHub isn't obviously adding any value there, these customers could just as well have pulled the phone number from Google Maps of the restaurant's own website.
I think GrubHub could be acting incorrectly in few ways:
1. Restaurants don't appear to be well informed of the cost. Deceiving your customer (eg by sneaking clauses into the contract) doesn't feel right.
2. GrubHub could be deceiving the restaurant's customers, who may be making a sincere effort to order from the restaurant directly.
3. In some local markets; GrubHub might have a kind of monopoly power. I think are a lot more constraints on how these kinds of businesses can dictate terms to other business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_restraints
Those businesses agreed to Grubhubs marketing services in hopes of expanding business. All Grubhub did was just painting over that businesses' existing signs and marketing, and demanding a fee.
Keep it simple: I kept a basket of takeout menus from my favorite neighborhood restaurants in the kitchen. Call the number on the takeout menu.
In the event you call and your menu is out of date, it's a minor inconvenience and you'll grab a new one when you go get your food. I never had a restaurant give me trouble because I had an old menu, usually they were happy I'd been a customer so long I had an old menu.
New restaurant? Yeah, you might end up calling from some shady Yelp number but then you add the takeout menu to your collection and use that number next time.
We don't need the internet to order from restaurants. Plus there's something nice about the time your favorite restaurant starts to recognize your number.
Pretty much every restaurant has a website these days. I go there. If they offer direct delivery, I use it. If they don't, they usually link to the grubhub etc. service they use, and I order there. At least then I know the restaurant was a fully consenting partner in the revenue share agreement.
Does anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about:
- Open Now (Optional)
- Sort by Rating
- Search by food category, not name of restaurant.
Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.
It doesn't give you an answer to your food allergy, but it is more about the food and rating/ranking than Yelp.
It's also sorted by dishes/food category. It aims to answer: "Where is the best place to get X dish in Y city?". Service, ambience, etc don't matter. It's only about where to get the best food.
This is awesome and I wish you the best of luck! Someone needs to take over this business.
I don't live in the heart of a big city. I live about an hour away from SF. Furthermore where I live is not at the heart of the city my address is at, due to unusual city boundaries, so services like grubhub and other delivery services do not work to my address, but if I put in my neighbors address they get a bunch of options I do not that are walking distance to me. My point is, it helps to center restaurants by gps or similar, not to address, not to city. Good luck! :D
Thank you! (And thanks for the info of a mobile map!)
One more question: Does it have a sort by ranking? I can't seem to find it on the desktop site. I may need to run it in Chrome. On Firefox it may not be displaying properly.
I know it sounds silly, but I really do need a sort by rating. This is still far better than nothing. Thank you. ^_^
I decided to test it and started with pupusaria (there are tons of them walking distance to here) and sadly it found none.
I then decided to try mexican food, the next most common restaurant out here, and I got Sonic's Drive in, McDonald's, and Subway. ... And I'm in the SF/Bay Area, so it should be easy. ... D:
One day Yelp will die, but for now it's a necessary evil. :(
My reaction was the same. Maybe Google Maps? Not that I want to send more of my data to Google, but this is totally unacceptable.
Especially during COVID, I'm trying to make sure that as much of my money goes to the restaurant as possible when I call in a takeout order. It would be one thing if Yelp showed me an advertisement and I clicked through and placed an order. But when I'm using Yelp just to look up a phone number, there's absolutely no reason for a commission.
Currently what I do is I look resturants up on Yelp, due to my food allergy mentioned above, then I go to google for the phone number. Problem is, Yelp delists companies that do not pay them.
I'd second Google Maps, unless you need to get realllllly granular with food category. My primary search for restaurants on Google Maps is "chinese food" or "hamburger" or the like and I always get appropriate results without being limited by business name.
Thanks for the reply. Any idea how to sort by rating? It's not giving me the option and is recommending food I'm allergic to. I searched for Mexican and got, Chili's, Chipotle, and Taco Bell, instead of listing hole in the wall places near by me, which are the restaurants I can eat at.
Sorry. I see it doesn't go to that detail. I usually use TripAdvisor when traveling, and appreciate the reviews - which don't have a vested interest as far as I can see. Possibly it isn't detailed enough for big cities with lots of great hole in the walls. Maybe we should suggest it to them? They used to have a great section where you could ask locals for advice and suggestions - which led to great ideas when traveling. I just checked, and it's called the travel forum. That would be interesting, to post there, with a specific question, and see who answers? I just checked locally, and people are still monitoring, so it may work. Good luck.
The problem is yelp has more money for lawyers than a low-margin local restaurant. That's why this should be treated as a criminal matter, with state prosecutors taking down Yelp.
Maybe, but the yelp competitors seem dirty too. There's a pizza shop down the street from me that seems to have three or four websites masquerading as them, each with different phone numbers.
Yelp executives being sent to prison would, I hope, sent a strong message to the others.
A local pizza chain has one telephone number which they advertise as a catchy jingle. Even after 15+ years of never eating there, it's one of maybe four phone numbers that I can recite from memory.
What if they fail? Would yelp retaliate against businesses that participated in the class action lawsuit? This possibility, even if unlikely, may dissuade many from even trying.
'If you come at the king, you best not miss.' - Omar
Class-Action lawsuits were created by lawyers who changed careers into politics and got funding for their campaign from the trial lawyers association in order to increase the amount of money trial lawyers can make
Mandatory arbitration was designed to get around class-action suits, arbitration does not create binding precedent. Constitutional originalism was invented to enshrine mandatory arbitration - if the framers of the Constitution didn't have it in mind it wasn't important or can be punted to a pernennial gridlocked legislature.
specifically, I don't see how this can be bribery. Who is the person or official that Yelp is bribing?
It's not Grubhub, since Grubhub doesn't really have any authority to guide purchases through their systems.
In fact, if anything, it's yelp which surreptitiously can guide purchases through more expensive (for the restaurant) services. But I don't think this is extortion either: Yelp is not forcing the customers to use them, nor the restaurant to use them. If one really pushes, I think that Yelp might yield and delist your business (which would be bad, but in a different way), and they anyhow aren't asking you for money for an extortion. They're (together with grubhub) "simply" asking the business money for an (unwelcome) service they provide.
(also, you'd probably have to sue Jeremy Stoppelman, and not Yelp if you really want to make a RICO claim)
Yelp is surely scummy, but I think that if people want to press charges, they should be for more run-of-the-mill fraud claims.
> Whatever the term that means “If you don’t pay us, bad things will happen.”
That would be extortion.
To shorten Popehat's explanation of RICO more fundamentally, RICO requires several elements to all apply to kick in. It is not mere extortion (plus other racketeering crimes). It is also not extortion repeated over several times. Instead, it is the repeated extortion by the defendant in the service of the distinct enterprise.
Stepping back out again, if you're arguing that a company's actions mean it violates RICO, you're almost certainly screwed because the defendant you're suing is the company, and the relevant enterprise is, uh, the company again, which causes the suit to fail.
So, no, it's not RICO because the defendant is Yelp and the enterprise is Yelp, and the defendant cannot be the enterprise.
Ob Lebowski: “Leads, yeah sure. I'll uh, just check with the boys down at the Crime Lab. They uh, got uh, four more detectives working on the case. They've got us working in shifts.”
Yelp, to restaurants: we get a commission on Grubhub orders.
Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine
———
Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub
Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s]
——
Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t actually telling any users that the restaurant’s number belongs to the restaurant, but come on. It’s clear that the intent is to mislead.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's pretty obvious that Yelp wouldn't do this if their contracts didn't cover it. The question is whether the contracts and sales language being used are worded to mislead the restaurant owner. I see no reference to contract language or sales language anywhere in the article or this thread.
> It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal?
No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.
In many cases they can and will if they either feel that the risks are worthwhile (in particular cases where the penalties are far exceeded the potential boon), or if they think they have some sort of edge case loophole that they can throw money at to get through. These are carefully calculated risks planned out by experienced teams of lawyers though.
Something like this though was almost certainly not one of those gambles.
Given yelp's reputation for having a toxic extortionist corporate culture, I think it's naive to assume anything is beyond them. If you told me yelp flat out had somebody murdered, I wouldn't dismiss even that out of hand. Not after what I've heard about their corporate culture, and not after hearing what eBay executives thought they could get away with.
I see a lot of people saying this must be illegal, and the reason Yelp hasn't been sued is because restaurant owners can't afford legal fees.
Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.
Still, if this is as obviously illegal as most people here are claiming it is, wouldn't a law firm take the case for free in exchange for a percentage of the fee Yelp will need to pay?
I am not a big fan of regulations unless it is to provide more transparency so people can make informed decisions. There should be regulations that require when listing a number for a business that there is a large disclaimer when the number isn’t actually owned by the business. I am sure that will kill this practice.
I'd guess (and it is a guess) that it wouldn't fall under this because Yelp would only show this "inauthentic" number for businesses that have signed an agreement with Yelp.
Yelp is going to be a mix of businesses that are just listed and have no relationship with Yelp and then things like a restaurant that has signed an agreement for GrubHub to handle some ordering for them. That agreement could include something like, "you agree that orders received via GrubHub will have this fee structure that you have to pay us and orders that come in via phone from our website are also considered an order generated by us and will have this fee structure".
At that point, the business is "agreeing" to that phone number. I put "agreeing" in quotes because restaurants might feel like they're compelled to agree or lose out on significant business given Yelp's market position.
I think it's harder to allege impersonation or fraud if the business has agreed to it. I think it's easier to allege that the business didn't really have a choice in the matter given the company's dominance in the market.
I grab the u/mdasen profile on misc medium. eg DNS, Facebook, Yelp, Tinder, Gmail, telco, USPS. I then pretend I'm u/mdasen. You (the IRL u/mdasen) eventually hear about my faux profiles and get grumpy.
What then are your options?
Are you claiming that Facebook (or whomever) has no ability or obligation to bounce me and transfer these u/mdasen profiles to you?
Yelp is one those companies. I use the product regularly, but I hate doing so -- the experience is awful and the core information is rarely particularly helpful. But they still get me to come in because they have the most information about some places.
What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.
It's like watching a victim of a scam artist complain to the police, get brushed off and then deciding "fuck it I guess I'll become a scam artist too then".
It's hypocritical and wrong but pretty understandable at the same time.
I've never needed it because every restaurant that I go to is on Google or maintains their own website. It's been known for years now that the reviews on Yelp are largely fake and they hide legit ones, so it's nearly useless for that as well. At least with Google Maps reviews, I can click on the reviewer and see the other places they've been.
Often the primary answer is photos. My experience with Google reviews having enough photos to find the dishes I'm considering is much more hit or miss.
But your question is fair. I often ask it myself as I'm exiting the site.
There are a mountain of lawsuits with Yelp over fake reviews.
This is a decent post, as it lists the outcome of a long-standing lawsuit (Yelp won) but also links out to several other lawsuits filed over the years about fake reviews on the site.
Nothing moral about their crusade - they got booted from the top of the search results along with other doorway-style crap like about.com and their conversion probably fell off the cliff. Had to explain that to investors somehow I suppose...
Sure but it was framed, in the consumer-facing messaging, as such.
They also didn't get booted from search -- they're still always capturing/clogging the top results. Google added all their own cruft at the top, but the search results haven't changed.
I personally haven’t worked on search anything so don’t know the details. From purely user perspective (and very anecdotal) some search results were almost entirely seo spam from about.com, yelp, etc but it’s no longer the case.
Right, which I absolutely refuse to do. I'm actually pretty surprised that Apple enables this and depends on Yelp so heavily. Like the other commenter said, I look forward to Apple creating their own service for this.
Google results for businesses and even government institutions here in NL are rife with numbers that have been replaced by expensive 1-900 numbers that connect you through to the business whose number you intended to reach. Very lucrative and highly unethical, and Google being part and parcel of this makes them look particularly bad. If anything Google should know what the right phone number for a business is, and if they can't even get that right you have to wonder about the quality of their results in general.
Of course the page of the business or entity you look for should be the top result for its own search query.
I fail to understand how exactly yelp/grubhub would bill the 10-20% of the order amount of the phone call. The call is recorded, yes (a reason why they can forget about that in the EU, in the EU you would need to implement a system for the caller to deny consent of the recording while on the line other than "if you don't like being recorded hang up now"). But do they manually listen to every phone call, make sure the restaurant place tells the correct amount, calculate their fee and put this on a bill to the restaurant?
A podcast I listen to just did an episode about this, specifically GrubHub. It's an automated system that analyzes the call, and it seemed to charge for any call over 45 seconds where food was discussed. As far as the amount goes, they used the average of the last X orders placed through the GrubHub app for that restaurant and charged some percentage of that. Then the owner is able to log in to their GrubHub account and see a list of all the calls they were charged for, listen to each one, and dispute any that didn't actually result in an order. The system is garbage.
They could set up a forwarding phone number as a way of proving effectiveness of advertising if they only publish the phone number there. A consensual arrangement is basically the only way it could work for all circumstances pick up or delivery through the number.
Oh this is not the first time Yelp has done this. Back in the day they tried charging businesses a fee to list a number and iirc it was per call. So they listed a proxy number so they could track and bill.
The crazy thing is to prevent search engines from indexing it (and getting sued for false billing) they rendered the number in an image-that-looks-like-text instead of text. I wonder if they are doing anything to prevent indexing of these false numbers or if they just don’t care now.
Not unique to Yelp and not their invention. The overall industry around utilizing dedicated phone numbers to measure effectiveness of ads goes back a while. This is collectively referred to as “Call Tracking”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call-tracking_software
The term evolved well before the current “tracking” lingo.
The more usual examples included yellow pages ads featuring phone numbers that forwarded to the businesses and allowed publishers to count how many “leads” were sent. Apartment listings magazines used these extensively, car ads, etc. - pretty much anything print or direct response web.
While Yelps use case may raise ire, the base tech and many of the implementations definitely are not intended to device. For a long time, most were toll-free numbers, as local numbers were too expensive, especially before VoIP became ubiquitous.
I don't understand. Why do you have to call the joint on an application? Yelp isn't available here, but on the local apps (Algeria), I can make the order by clicking on foods, adding quantities, adding drinks, then confirming the order.
For every joint, there's their menu with different tabs (drinks, desserts, pizzas, burgers, briskets, pastrami, etc) custom for every joint.
The app then tells me when the joint has accepted the order, when the rider picked up my order, and where the rider is. The rider comes to the office, gives me food, I give them money, and good bye.
I can even click to re-order the same thing, or make several orders from different places (when you want food from several places). And if the joint is not featured in the app, you can make a custom order where you describe what you want, and put the address of the joint.
You can even just buy items (chocolate bars, water) on the app. I don't understand why do you have to call on an app. That sucks.
> I don't understand why do you have to call on an app. That sucks.
I call every restaurant I order from because I want the restaurant taking every dime of the order. I don't want Grubhub or Doordash or whoever "facilitates the transaction" to take a percentage of my order. Worse yet, some restaurants in my area have wised up and increased menu item prices for app-facilitated purchases only to avoid margin erosion, so I'm definitely not going to pay more for the privilege of "clicking buttons on an app".
I will use Yelp or Grubhub on occasion for discoverability. Hyper-SEO has lead to real restaurant websites falling out of my Google results, so sometimes I need to look up their phone number.
Yelp knows that there are people like me, and are now positioning themselves to suck more cash out of my local restaurants by hijacking my phone call to them. Fuck that, no more Yelp for me. I'll continue adding known good phone numbers to my phone & taking pictures of paper menus so I can refer to them when I want.
I Googled a local Indian restaurant I wanted to order from this weekend. The top result had the restaurant name and looked like their site. Online ordering sent me to MealHi5, which didn't seem to think there are any restaurants in our area. So I called, ordered, and asked about online order when I picked up the food. It turns out they have a different domain that is setup (I think, and/or Google is good at recognizing restaurants) to show an "Order Online" button under the Google business summary. That takes me to a different online ordering site that isn't MealHi5 that I'm assuming works.
I'm assuming either a service did the "register a domain for all the local restaurants" trick, or they switched restaurant hosting providers and the domain changed but not the top result in Google, or something else.
It is really a shame to me that DuckDuckGo uses Yelp reviews in their search results. I understand they want to use a common review provider that's not Google, but Yelp is just so antithetical to the stated values of DDG
As I've said before of such practices, I want to start a website called "Grubhub-help.com" or something like that. Buy a lot of ads on google. Then I'll redirect customers that go there to whoever pays me the most money.
It's literally the same business model that grubhub/yelp have- misrepresenting myself as another company in order to make money- but turned around on them.
And maybe to make it more fun, if nobody pays then I'll just redirect the user to 4chan or some other ugly corner of the internet.
I think I stopped actually using Yelp for phone numbers and just use Google Maps simply for convenience. They keep a pretty decent set of business details up to date. I often use them to lookup company headquarters. Never knew or experienced Yelp polluting the business details.
As a user, their “sponsored” section showing me Subway ads when searching for something in an entirely different class is starting to annoy me. If I missed their “Sponsored” title, I would assume there were no results matching what I am looking for.
as much as i like apple, one thing i absolutely hate is that searching for anything in apple maps brings up yelp suggestions for restaurant:
1) not only are you faced with downloadin the yelp app to look at more pictures which are present on the first page but
2) after reading articles like these i'm in concern that instead of supporting my local mom and pop restaurants i'm now being routed intentionally through god knows who.
i know this is yelp article, but apple and other companies relie on yelp, and if they choke off this behavior it would be a good step to correcting it.
It's basically just a forced affiliate program. I mean, they have a case for taking e.g. 10% or something, but it's sort of silly to not ask for consent as such a large company.
I read so many bad things about Yelp's shady business that I'm surprised they are still a hot topic. And I never used their services since I'm eastern European.
I never use Yelp because they have very sketchy/bullying business practices. I much prefer word of mouth and Google, combined those two are more than enough for my needs.
At some level shouldn't Google feel some heat here? Yelp and GrubHub may be gaming the SEO, but Google owns the kingdom. This problem is prevalent enough that Google can't claim not to know about it. And they've certainly invested time in the past to make the algorithms give preference to more likely correct information. They should be penalizing Yelp and GrubHub sites, they're easy enough to recognize.
It won't take too long before people just quit trusting Google search results. That's probably for the best, unless you're Google, which is why I'm surprised they haven't nipped this practice in the bud.
My wife and I stopped using Yelp a couple years ago because of all sorts of nonsense on their platform. We find much better reviews on city-specific subreddits.
This seems like a clear false / deceptive advertising issue, not protected as a Section 230 safe harbor act, that should easily be addressable by the FTC.
The problem with these fast moving situations is who would actually initiate that expensive legal endeavor. Yelp has a history of preying on small businesses with what is effectively extortion to remove promoted negative online reviews in what are essentially digital protection rackets. You could argue this is RICO territory.
This new pernicious hijacking of contact details is likely to be deployed by other future 'startups' to siphon off profits, so it's important that Yelp gets sanctioned.
Restaurants are terrified to sue Yelp because of the severe power differential between the "phone book" directory and themselves, especially given the long-standing rumors (whether true or not, the perception exists) that Yelp punishes anyone that complains by promoting bad reviews to their page.
While the solution from NYC seems good to start, why don't customers get charged for fees if they are the ones calling? I feel like in the US splitting fees between the caller and receiver causes a lot of problems (see: spam calls which can become prohibitively expensive if the caller has to eat all the fees)
Customers balk at fees in many cases. Free shipping doesn't really make sense as it is baked into the item price, but it gets a lot more people to buy.
Wait I don’t get the hate over this. This isn’t Grubhub pretending to be the restaurant or anything. This is Grubhub doing the equivalent of Google Search’s link tracking but for phone numbers so that they can attribute the sale to Yelp.
Is it weird that Yelp has made referral codes for phone calls?
> When a user clicks on the “Call” button labeled “Delivery or Takeout,” they are taken to a different number, (646) 394-9837, which is owned by Grubhub.
> Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews. But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.”
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub.
I don't think Grubhub has any defense for creating websites for restaurants without asking. But this is something they've also stopped doing and this is a completely separate issue.
In many cases, neither Yelp nor Grubhub are adding value here. They are inserting themselves as rentiers because they are better at SEO (i.e. have more money) than the restaurants themselves. It amounts to a shakedown similar to domain squatting.
That's not to mention the surveillance capitalism angle of phone calls that would previously be private now being recorded by Grubhub.
Near as I can tell people have been told to be angry at "big tech" often enough by vested interests that they believe it. Now "big tech" is a bogeyman and every action interpretted as a crime agaist humanity for not meeting their lofty standards which they apply only to foes.
That and a whole bunch of other stupid memes like "If it is something I cannot understand it must be bad!" and tribal provincialism.
I understand charging a fee to the customer who is making the choice to call, but if a restaurant simply answers the phone - how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?
> how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?
In America, only the government is allowed to come up to you and say pay me this without you consenting. In all the businesses I’ve been involved with for over 2 decades, there are plenty of times someone sends an invoice for something you didn’t agree to, and you can always just ignore it.
It's not Yelp who is charging them. They have a pre-existing business relation with Grubhub that generates leads for them for a fee, and, according to Yelp, allows Grubhub to charge them for any lead generated on any partner platform, which Yelp became in 2018.
So now what used to be a free stream of customers is hijacked by Grubhub. I'm sure it hasn't crossed their minds when they signed up with Grubhub that in addition to new sales generated with them, they will also start paying commission on their existing clientele.
A business owner trapped in a market where the Grubhub-Yelp duopoly is proeminent is basically fucked, and they will use their rent seeking revenues to further entrench their dominance by offering consumer discounts, fidelity options etc.
For the record, I dislike this practice...but to play devil's advocate (pls don't downvote for playing devil's advocate LOL)
If I go to Google and I type in {name of my favorite restaurant}...and the first link on top is an ad placed by that restaurant, and below it is the actual restaurant's website...If I click on that ad, Google will charge that restaurant money, when it just redirects me to the website.
In this case, GrubHub is claiming that they placed the phone number on Yelp, so they get money.
I mean I think paying $8 (or whatever percentage of an order is) for that redirect is highway robbery given thin margins for a restaurant...
1: There is no way for the customer to tell that the phone number is not 100% organic. On Google, you can tell it's an ad (even if this is getting harder as Google disguises ads more and more).
2: Grubhub didn't place phone numbers on Yelp. Yelp has had phone numbers since day 1.
If Grubhub puts menus or something on Yelp and someone uses that to place an order more efficiently, then they would be adding some value. That still wouldn't justify charging a premium without telling/asking either party, but I would at least agree there is some value-add there (but only for customers who actually look at the GrubHub-provided menu before calling in).
Most people would agree that what Google is doing is also immoral.
But ignoring that, I don't see the equivalency - you are paying Google to prevent someone else from paying them more and showing up above you; in the Yelp case, your phone number already existed on Yelp, and someone is already on the page, yet GrubHub still adds their number.
Just pointing out that it's typical for tech companies to employ dark pattern for monetization in instances where they are providing no value. Playing wack-a-mole won't help and we probably need some sort of legislation to prove value is being provided before being charged.
(BTW I don't believe paying Google to prevent being above me is value ad. The intention of the searcher is known)
Another example is how Google charges an app creator 30% if someone purchases a subscription. A charge that occurs every, single, month despite Google providing no value after the first month. What's an app owner to do? Push for Apple store...where also take 30% cut?
The position occupied by Yelp only generates opportunities to scam. There's no natural surplus-generating business there. Few entrepreneurs would choose to compete for that, when they're just starting out. Maybe some would be forced into it after too many pivots, but Yelp is probably clever enough to stay ahead of them.
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
[edited for punctuation]