Yelp is a Big Tech company that isn't listed when people talk about "big tech," but it's nonetheless all about tech and it's unarguably big, with well over 100 million unique visitors per month to their site and a valuation in the $ billions.
How good is their software? Are they a company from which non-tech corporate America should poach talent to upgrade their in-house tech? I recently had occasion to spend a little time with Yelp, and found that they are indeed an exemplar of the Big Tech tradition of tech bumbling as I have documented.
Harvard Business School famously teaches according to the case study method. Students are presented the case and challenged with figuring out what to do. Yelp would make an excellent case study. Any of the bright, aggressive b-school students who declared that the "solution" to the case was to fire all the executives and replace the entire product and tech team with talented high school grads, would get at least a B. Anyone who further suggested avoiding hiring anyone with a Computer Science degree would get an A.
Yelp and Local Business
Yelp is an advertising company that features listings of local businesses and user-generated reviews of those businesses.I recently visited my local dentist and received excellent care on the way to getting a crown put on one of my teeth. She knows I'm a computer guy and I've helped her out in the past, so she brought up her concern about a couple of malicious false reviews that were posted to her Yelp page. I'd said I'd check it out. I did. The results were illuminating. I sometimes complain about bumbling big corporate companies and their painful but fixable software problems. Yelp provides a great example of how second-tier Big Tech companies are no better at building software than the super-famous first tier ones are.
Yelp and a Local Dentist Business
I checked out Yelp's page for my dentist, Doctor Vu. It had a couple long negative reviews. So I posted a review of my experience, along with a selfie of me at her office.
I went back after a couple days to check out the page in more detail.
At the top of the page:
I see that she has 5 reviews with an average score of what looks like 3.5.
I scrolled down and found the photo section with the photo I had posted:
I took the selfie in her office holding the coaster I had given her last year that I couldn't resist buying at my favorite store in Cape May. She's had it in her waiting room ever since; I hear it often elicits amusement. It just seemed right to take the picture at the end of a visit to get a crown. :-)
After scrolling through ads and other information I got to the reviews. Mine was first:
I scrolled through the rest, including the two 1-star slams. Something didn't seem right. I went back and carefully counted the reviews. I double-checked. There were 6 reviews! The header at the top said 5! Then I made note of the star ratings. The two super-baddies were 1 star and the other 4 were 5 stars each. That's 22 points divided by 6 reviews = 3.67. Looking carefully at the points at the top, the dividing line is clearly at the top of the star, so Yelp thinks it's 3.5.
But then Yelp said there were only 5 reviews in spite of displaying 6. Is it 22/5? Nope, that's 4.4. A complete mystery. Maybe I'll figure it out later.
At the end I found this:
What's this about? In faint type 16 other reviews? I check it out. At the top of the page that shows up there's a video I can watch and this long, serious-sounding thing about how Yelp cares and they're smart and they're doing the best for everyone:
Impressive! Finally I scroll down to check out these malicious reviews and here's the first thing I see:
Wow. Billions of data points! That software must be good, right? So I scroll down to see these scurrilous reviews. Imagine my surprise when I see this:
Wow. My review. Again!
At least the mystery of the rating average is solved. Even though my review was shown among the legit reviews -- first, no less -- it appears that their ludicrously bad software had marked it as not recommended and so some piece of software decided there were just 5 reviews. So 3 5-star plus 2 1-star is 17 stars, divided by 5 is 3.4. Close enough to the 3.5 average rating they displayed.
Even better -- I received a congratulatory email from Yelp after posting the review with the picture, saying how great it was and I should post more pictures along with my excellent reviews. My picture is indeed featured. And my review is both first on the list of legit reviews AND first on the list of those not recommended. Score! This is what you get by employing thousands of Silicon Valley's best super-programmers...
Those billions of data points must have somehow confused the Yelpers. And their software.
Finally I read through the rest of the reviews that weren't recommended. There was nothing fake about them.
I visited Dr. Vu again to get actually crowned -- the first visit was just preparation. She told me she had contacted Yelp about the situation. First she learned that the Yelp algorithms were state-of-the-art great, and in any case there was nothing a Yelp employee could do to alter their results. Second she learned that she really should pay Yelp lots of money so she could fix up her page, post pictures, etc. Maybe if she paid something could be done about those bad reviews...
My conclusion from this wasn't hard to figure. Yelp is corrupt (pay to play!). Yelp is incompetent (bad algorithms, double-posting, bad arithmetic). Sensible people should ignore Yelp.
Conclusion
I'm tempted to say that Yelp fits right in with its first tier Big Tech buddies, and of course it does. If you can stand it, check out the summary of their issues on Wikipedia. I did and also went to some sources to make sure it wasn't a Wiki hit-job. I also checked out the disastrous business and personal judgment and behavior of the leaders. Pathetic. Yelp is now on my blocked list of websites.
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