Yelp and the Art of Ferreting Out Fake Reviews

Published on Thursday, March 25, 2010, by Lessley Anderson / Edit Post

In a hardball interview in today’s New York Times business section, writer Kermit Pattison grills Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about his company’s alleged “extortion” schemes. The issue, of course, is the national class action lawsuit against Yelp from local business owners who claim Yelp manipulated their reviews to get them to advertise, moving bad ones to the top if they didn’t, and good ones to the top if they did. (For more in-depth reading on the allegations, Oakland, California alternative newsweekly the East Bay Express published a fascinating story last year)

Stoppelman has been trying to shiny up his public image recently, and in today’s interview he makes a valiant effort. So, does his company extort people? “Absolutely not,” says Stoppelman. Yelp created an “automated and algorithmic review filter” that “doesn’t take into account advertiser status, and works the same for everyone.” In fact, this remarkable algorithm “ensures that the customer sees…trustworthy information.” Damn, this algorithm surely sounds like the bomb. “The coffee shop across town doesn’t like you…and wants to write negative reviews…We’re trying to catch that and remove it automatically.”

Extortion issues aside, “ensuring trustworthiness” on a review site seems like a pretty tough task to automate. That’s an understatement. A lot of time and energy is spent by human moderators on our user-generated review site, Chowhound, trying to weed out suspiciously great reviews that have, in fact, been written by the restaurant’s own staff or PR firm. The tales of how these shills are uncovered and banished often read like mini gumshoe detective stories, with somewhat less exciting plot twists: “And then we noticed that the email address of the reviewer was an anagram of the restaurant name!” In any case, I’m no computer whiz, but is it possible to write an algorithm that can keep up with human beings’ remarkable ability to lie and deceive?

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  • I'm not sure if Yelp is actively extorting money, but they have created a situation that makes business owners pay them for help. Yelp filters reviews (they move "bad" reviews to a section where they are not pat of your score). What's a bad review? Yelp won't say. The algorithm for filtering is very proprietary, and there is no recourse if you are filtered.

    The math behind the software may...+READ

    I'm not sure if Yelp is actively extorting money, but they have created a situation that makes business owners pay them for help. Yelp filters reviews (they move "bad" reviews to a section where they are not pat of your score). What's a bad review? Yelp won't say. The algorithm for filtering is very proprietary, and there is no recourse if you are filtered.

    The math behind the software may "unfiltered" you after a while, but there is no method of appeal or discussion. I've personally created 22 reviews (and a full profile, my picture on the site, "friending" other Yelpers, generally trying to be a good citizen. Every one of my reviews is filtered. If I'm doing something that's leading to filtering, it would be useful to get feedback. It would also be useful to be told when a review is filtered. That's one of the surprising things about Yelp, even the reviewers don't know when they are being filtered. When you go to a business you've reviewed the first review you see is yours... but that doesn't mean that it is not filtered. If you sort the list, look again or go to the filtered section and you ma find that you're filtered.

    I've looked at various businesses, and I see up to 2/3 of the reviews filtered. This certainly gets the attention of the business owner. When they contact Yelp (of when Yelp proactively contacts you) the conversation quickly moves to how their paid services can help you. If you follow their advice (including talking to every reviewer), your score probably will go up. No other review site that I can think of leverages user reviews like that to generate revenue.

    In my case I THINK that because all of my reviews are positive, I could look like a bot of some sort, assuming that Central Park, Moma, and the museum of natural history are paying for fake reviews. Of course, if they allowed communication with reviewers they could quickly ind out who was and wasn't real, resolving the #1 reason that they say they filter.-COLLAPSE

  • That's not true for everyone. I post reviews on Yelp every few months; no I am not a professional food critic but then ... I write about my real life experiences for regular folks. Nothing fake about that.

  • I think Yelp is a crock, it's mostly amateurs who like to complain. People who think they know so much about food and want to feel like they're important food critics.

  • absolutely not, the base instincts of mankind is so hard wired it is amazing to me that we are not feral creatures and the way people behave in restaurants in new jersey leads me to believe that most of them are feral.
    Acting like a pack of wolves is a blood libel against wolves.
    But don't get me started.
    Glad i am an old man, Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties was heaven on earth.
    aw for...+READ

    absolutely not, the base instincts of mankind is so hard wired it is amazing to me that we are not feral creatures and the way people behave in restaurants in new jersey leads me to believe that most of them are feral.
    Acting like a pack of wolves is a blood libel against wolves.
    But don't get me started.
    Glad i am an old man, Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties was heaven on earth.
    aw for the good old days.
    Peace all around-COLLAPSE