Yelp vs Urbanspoon

As someone who's been reviewing restaurants and clubs for as long as the internet has been around, I take it seriously. Not because I want to feel like my opinions are gospel; but because I'd like to help other people avoid an unexpected experience, particuarly when they're on vacation and they only have a few days to find what they want. There are few resources that are of real value; the newspaper (in our case the Sun-Sentinel) has the greatest volume, but you'll rarely read a negative review in the newspaper. 10 years ago newspapers had real restaurant critics, but now they just have copywriters. They make pizzerias sound like a special occasion venue. Then you have "magazine" type resources, like Dine Magazine and South Florida Food and Wine, who just crank out one puff piece after another to a point where they have as much credibility as the restaurant's brochures.

User reviews by "real people" are all the rage, but do they really provide a useful resource? First let it be stated that there are many problems with user reviews in general: more people eat at Denny's and McDonalds than Mortons so their "expertise" is limited. Most regular people aren't objective. They see user reviews as a way to get back at places that have done them wrong. Many user reviews are shills; people with an agenda trying to pump up or knock down a venue. Sometimes people act badly and deserve bad service. You can't tell with user reviews. There's a lot of noise to sift through.

If there was such a thing, Zagat used to be the gold standard of user based reviews. Not too long ago, Zagat was the only game in town. They've been around for years, and many rely on Zagat Ratings. Zagat has a system that requires a certain volume of "votes" to come up with their ratings, and they use a consensus method to come up with the numbers. Problems with Zagat is that venues that don't have enough votes don't show a rating. In order to compete, Zagat has gone to electronic surveys with unvetted participants. You can't judge the credibility of the voters on your own. I've had a subscription for years and I vote; but they didn't know if I was credible or just some schlub who could afford the fees. A savvy owner can have his staff and regular customers set themselves up as voters to "stuff" the ballots. There are always a few entries that are just silly. LaSpada's Hoagies had the top Food rating in Fort Lauderdale. Need I say more?

Zagat was purchased by Google, and they've really done a bad job. Zagat Miami seems like a teenager with a twitter account and a blog. Read a few tweets and you understand that it has no value as a resource.

Meanwhile, Yelp is gaining in popularity among young people, but Yelp is more of a social network than a serious review site. They don't even pretend to be serious; the big reward for a frequent "Yelper" is to be tagged as "Elite", which guarantees them invitations to free Yelp Social Events, and gets them access to T-Shirts that they can wear to garner VIP treatment at restaurants and clubs. Their stated criteria for Elite status is that they are looking for reviews that have "pizazz" and people who are "cool". Accuracy or Objectivity are not mentioned. They try to pass off these "Elites" as being "more credible", but there is no objective process in place to select Elites; it seems to be based on volume. Granting perceived status in the community and invitations to free parties appeals to the young, the poor and the insecure. So the entire model doesn't lend itself to attracting credible restaurant reviews.

I've spent some time reading reviews by so-called Elite about places that I know very well, and their reviews seem just as randomly bad as any other. I have a suspicion that more than just a few Elites are selling their services, or that there is something in place to reward them for pumping up certain places. It's very suspicious when a place gets a bunch of 5 star "elite" reviews that just don't represent the truth about the restaurant.

Yelp will randomly hide reviews based on some murky criteria that they only describe as "automated". So if you're not a regular user, your reviews may not even be visible to the general public. Yelp doesn't care how good or useful the reviews are; its a sort of punishment for not participating more often. It all fits into Yelp's erroneous assertion that people with more reviews are more credible. They do have a "community manager" for each of their "Cities", but the community manager in Miami is more like a Mommy to keep the kiddies in line than she is an expert on anything. Her role seems to be to encourage users to post more and more. She's wholly unfamiliar with Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, and claims to play no part in selecting Elites.

Yelp is what I call a "taker". Their terms of service require users to relinquish their intellectual property rights to their content. Yelp uses the content to generate search engine hits and to distribute to media partners. But yelp is a one-way ticket. They threatened to cancel my membership for mentioning my web site. They allow you to display yelp info on your web site as long as you advertise their site, but they don't give you any cross advertising.

Proof the Yelp is a joke is that at the time of this writing, Bravo! was listed as the top restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. Bravo! is a small venezuelan sandwich shop. Nacho Bizness was listed as #2; Nacho Bizness is a food truck that sells tacos for $2.50. Are you really going to use Yelp to make your choices?

Urbanspoon has been evolving randomly and I can't say that I like the results. Until recently, Urbanspoon gave a higher status to blog and newspaper reviews, giving readers links to local resources as well as user reviews. For some reason, they've de-emphasized the blogs and newspaper reviews now and just intermingle them with the user reviews now, with the default sort by date. So a recent review by a nobody is now elevated above a local critic review that's a bit out of date. The emphasis of "professional" reviews was the thing I liked most about Urbanspoon.

The recent re-design uses bigger fonts and pictures but it seems to me that they're just trying things randomly without much of a plan. The same handful of people doing most of the posting 2 years ago are the same ones doing it now. They don't seem to be attracting many new users; at least not in Fort Lauderdale.

The reviews on Urbanspoon tend not to be as good, at least not in our area, because there don't seem to be very many credible people posting reviews. There's no shill filter on Urbanspoon, so often owners and PR companies post fake reviews that get as much credibility as actual, objective reviews. Urbanspoon doesn't have "elites"; they have what they call "Primes". There's no real benefit to being a Prime except that they can add restaurants without having it reviewed by a staff member. This really helps Urbanspoon out; Primes are really just free field workers that create content without costing anything. There are people who spend a lot of time adding restaurants and menus and I'm not quite sure why they bother donating so much of their time.

Latest News

The big news is that Zomato, an Indian company, purchased Urbanspoon and are in the process of taking over the operations. Already some of the colors are moving away from the Yellow and Blue and moving toward a Tomato color. I'm not sure what Zomato can do to save the site; it's really been quite a failure. People just don't like to leave reviews. Yelp is popular because it's really more of a social site. Leaving restaurant reviews for the sake of it doesn't seem to have much appeal, except for people with an agenda. When all of your reviewers are either promoting restaurants or trying to knock them down; you have a problem.