By Jasper Y. Arcalas & Jhoana L. Tuazon
CALLED the “Billion Dollar Bully” by San Francisco filmmaker Kaylie Milliken, American multinational firm Yelp Inc. said it is standing by its business model as the company began operations in the Philippines.
According to Vice President Mirriam Warren, they are “confident” about their “recommendation software,” a filtering system, against paid reviews.
“We’re pretty confident in the fact that the recommendation software that we’ve been employing on Yelp, which is a sophisticated algorithm that we’ve had pretty much since the inception of Yelp, works well against these sort of things that are against our terms of service [fake reviews],” Warren told the BusinessMirror. “So I’m not particularly frightened about that, and I believe enough on the capacity of our recommendation engine.”
Yelp utilizes recommendation software that examines reviews of Yelp users and recommends reviews that the system thinks to be trustworthy and helpful to its users based on three criteria: quality, reliability and user activity on Yelp, Warren explained.
Yelp has at least 77 million reviews to date, 71 percent of which are recommended by their recommendation software. And about 22 percent are not recommended, with 7 percent, or at least 5.4 million, removed from the application, according to the documents provided by Yelp.
“It’s an algorithm that is constantly changing, with some of our brightest and best engineers working on it. You know we have to work on it quite diligently to make sure that we are always one step ahead of [the] people who want to try to game the system,” Warren said during their Philippine launch in end-June.
In 2013 New York’s “Operation Clean Turf,” which aims to detect firms hiring fake reviewers for businesses, concluded with 19 companies slapped with fines totaling $350,000, according to a Fortune news report. Recently, the United Kingdom’s Competitions and Market Authority announced it is planning “an international project on online reviews and endorsement,” according to a BBC news report.
“Yes, as more consumers are basing their decisions on crowd-sourced reviews, there’s a greater incentive for businesses to cheat. And so far, the consequences have been extremely small, though the New York fines are a small step in the right direction,” Georgios Zervas said, coauthor of a research about Yelp’s realibility, said in an interview report found online.
According to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it has received at least 2,000 complaints, mostly from small businesses, from 2008 to 2014, who criticized Yelp’s slow action on filtering out fake reviews. Earlier this year, Yelp said that the FTC did two investigations, but both were eventually closed, with no actions done against them.
“They tried to investigate and look into Yelp’s business practices and determine [the allegations, and] there was nothing that didn’t match up with the things that we have said here and elsewhere,” Warren said.
Warren assured advertisers will not get into the way of the reviews, even though they are maintaining a good relationship with them.
“All the reviews are taken in the same way. If you’re an advertiser, you don’t get any preferential treatment on the reviews, so advertising and reviews have no connection to one another. If you paid for advertising, you get advertising [that] doesn’t have bearing on the review.”
With its launch, Yelp has now opened for reviews for local business entities. It also has a page for local businesses to promote their store and advice users with their future promos and discounts.
Based on Google analytics, Yelp has 142 million visitors as of the first quarter of 2015.