I would like to start by saying I find Yelp to be a much better alternative than Citysearch. I hardly use citysearch anymore. But I find Yelp broken in a big way especially given that they want to be a social recommendation engine. Heres my biggest problem with Yelp:
I search on a restaurant, I find that the restaurant has a total of 4 stars out of 5. Do I decide to go tothe restaurant based on the cumulative rating? No, I dont cos I want to hear what the reviewers who have dined at the restaurant are saying. Now, I will read the top 3 – maybe 5 reviews. The first problem is that I cant imagine anyone going beyond 10 and still finding anything relevant that other reviewers havent said before. Its like Google search – who the hell goes to page #5 to see the search results.
Unfortunately, what Yelp fails to do unlike Google is showing me the results according to the reputation, feedback of the reviewers. Would I believe a person who has reviewed only one restaurant or someone who has reviewed hundreds, should I believe the lates reviewer or someone who reviewed the restaurant 6 months back? Yelp needs to develop some sort of a reputation model on top of simply users giving 4 or 5 stars to restaurants. What they need to allow me to do is to return to the site after visiting the restaurant and give the user whose review most matches my own experience a thumbs up or down. Then use the feedback to weigh the order in which the reviews are shown.
Their relevance engine needs to use parameters like freshness of review, feedback on the user’s rating, users rating itself, # of reviews the user has given, etc. to rank the reviews. This will make my Yelp experience more satisfying!
Posted by adharni 