Internet has became an integral part of our lives. Food market is not away from the same any more. When looking for food places for example we go through the restaurant directories to find most suitable one to meet our needs. Apart from location, timings, cuisine and other stuff, the reviews for the place plays a vital role in decision making, right?
Yelp.com is one of the biggest names in this field. It not only provide a huge list of BurgerJoints and various details for the same (for that matter, a number different kind of businesses, but we focus BurgerJoints and restaurant here); but also provides the rating and reviews for each of them. Yelp is famous for its “real people, real reviews” tagline. However there are questions raised on some of the reviews in past, but it doesn’t affect the trustability of Yelp much.
Several study reports (found on Internet) says that having positive reviews/rating on Yelp for the business, affects the business positively (and vice versa). In order to deal with fake/paid reviews Yelp tries various mechanisms and it came up with Review filters. Now whenever it finds a review which seems to be untrue it alerts the consumers for the same.
The consumer alert reads like:
We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business. We weren’t fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only hurts customers, but also honest business who play by the rules. Check out the evidence here.
All the details about this stuff can be read at http://officialblog.yelp.com/2012/10/consumer-alerts-because-you-might-like-to-know.html. As it is a positive steps for the consumers, we think it will add more value to Yelp’s trustability.
What you think about the same?