Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
Good for her. Yelp&#x27;s business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate.<p>If I search for &quot;dinner&quot; on Yelp for &quot;current location&quot; and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street.<p>And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to try to keep people from talking about it, and the moral interests just get worse and worse.<p>Google Maps isn&#x27;t any better; OpenTable seems the &quot;least bad&quot; of options I&#x27;ve looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of <i>actually showing my options</i>.<p>(It&#x27;s a broader internet problem in general - &quot;trending&quot; algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq&#x2F;ramen&#x2F;whatver place, when probably there&#x27;s half a dozen other options within 10% of taste and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like better if they heard about them too.)