This may be the case in San Francisco. It's not the case elsewhere, however, at least for this anecdotal sample size of one. :)
Business travel takes me all over the country and Yelp is incredibly reliable. I've lost track of the number of times that someone recommends a place, Yelp says it's a 2-3 star place, we go anyway, and yup, it's average at best.
I hear and see the complaints of restauranteurs about Yelp. Yet my experiences at places usually match what's seen in reviews. There's a restaurant in my hometown where the owner, a friend of mine, constantly complained about Yelp reviews where the the sentiment was that his food was too expensive and not of consistent quality (I agreed with the reviews). A few weeks ago he decided to close the place because of declining revenues. Had he listened to the reviews, settled for a bit less margin, and worked with his staff to produce a consistent product he'd still be in business.
Edit: I neglected to add that it's really important to read reviews for context. Sometimes you just have people bitching because they're a gluten-sensitive nut-allergic vegan and the place didn't cater to their highly specific needs.
I too travel all around the country for business, and I find Yelp to be less than helpful. I agree with you that reading the reviews for context is critical. In fact, that's the only way to really get a read on a place. But with hundreds of restaurants to choose from, and hundreds of reviews each (if there are only a handful of reviews, you can't rely on them at all), it's incredibly time consuming to go through them. I find that the star ratings are pretty much worthless. They get dragged down by people who ding fine dining restaurants for not having Olive Garden prices, and others who mark down local greasy spoons for not having French Laundry service. I don't care how the diner compares to the French Laundry. I care how it compares to other diners. A single rating scale across all types of restaurants is probably counterproductive, but the problem is greatly magnified by throngs of clueless reviewers who have bogus expectations and are rating places based on them.
Collaborative filtering is the obvious way to make a scalable restaurant ratings service. Google tried to do it and apparently failed; then Yelp tried to do it [http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/06/whats-nearby.html]. Not being a Yelp user myself, I don't know if they are still doing this. Anybody have insight into whether Yelp is still personalizing recommendations or why personalization hasn't worked in restaurants (in contrast to e.g., Netflix)?
IMO, the star rating is useless as 4 stars can often be worse than 2.5 stars, but some random reviews can be helpful.
So, if your willing to spend a while going over them it's better than nothing. However, actual restaurant reviews are more accurate, take less time to use, and your less likely to read 10 reviews and learn nothing. IMO, Yelp way over hyped for how little value it's actually providing.
This may be the case in San Francisco. It's not the case elsewhere, however, at least for this anecdotal sample size of one. :)
Could we stop shutting down opinions using the sample size argument? It's one of the weakest arguments you can make:
'I think different so your opinion isn't valid because anecdote!'
'Oh you don't agree with my opinion? Well that's not valid either because anecdote!'
Not every discussion is capable of having prior polling as evidence (polling has its own issues with bias anyways). A highly voted on comment has >> 1 people who share the same sentiment and the beauty of sites like these is highly up-voted comments bubble to the top.
While we're ignoring the very specific statistical requirement to have at least a minimum of a significance level, could we please stop using the faux-grammatical prepositional-because?
Regarding upvotes as a proxy for "me too": an upvote doesn't mean "me too" in many cases, it means "this comment was something I thought contributed to the discussion in a meaningful way." Thus using upvotes as a proxy for a sample size counter, isn't even remotely accurate because upvotes do not necessarily correlate to me or anyone else sharing your sentiment. They only correlate to someone saying that your posting added value.
I upvote things all the time with which I disagree because the commenter made a strong argument and it added to the quality of the discussion. I downvote things with which I sometimes agree because perhaps the point was badly made, inflammatory or otherwise not enriching to the discussion. And then, I also downvote comments that use trendy I "haz cheeseburger" level diction. Of course, given my own guidelines, I probably ought to downvote myself.
Business travel takes me all over the country and Yelp is incredibly reliable. I've lost track of the number of times that someone recommends a place, Yelp says it's a 2-3 star place, we go anyway, and yup, it's average at best.
I hear and see the complaints of restauranteurs about Yelp. Yet my experiences at places usually match what's seen in reviews. There's a restaurant in my hometown where the owner, a friend of mine, constantly complained about Yelp reviews where the the sentiment was that his food was too expensive and not of consistent quality (I agreed with the reviews). A few weeks ago he decided to close the place because of declining revenues. Had he listened to the reviews, settled for a bit less margin, and worked with his staff to produce a consistent product he'd still be in business.
Edit: I neglected to add that it's really important to read reviews for context. Sometimes you just have people bitching because they're a gluten-sensitive nut-allergic vegan and the place didn't cater to their highly specific needs.