In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator).
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
A few people seemed to have missed an important step in the argument:
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
"The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark."
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
I find it fascinating when someone finds a historical parallel to a situation that we think is novel and unprecedented, reminding us that nothing is truly new, and it's not as bad as we think.
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
I would say there's no moral difference between a human operator and a mechanical operator whose behavior is controlled by a human. Configuring the operator to drop calls from a particular area code would be an example in the case you provided.
Sure. It just used to be harder to build in, and to do so precisely. In your example, dropping calls from an area code, that's a relatively coarse filter.
There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black poor people in buses could not [1, p123].
These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
"Mechanical honesty" worked because it was much harder to have automated "if statement" mechanisms with non-electronic machinery. And then electronic computers made it much, much easier.
Can you elaborate more on (or give an example of) "mechanical honesty"? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem unfeasible to implement biases in mechanical systems (especially government departments!), but I haven't given it a lot of thought.
It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book.
Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough.
One could argue that Google has been exploiting this since the creation of AdWords: they will happily sell the right to advertise on a search for your exact company name to a competitor, a nice income stream which verges on extortion.
It's even possible to deliver personalized dishonest results; applications including search engines know who you are, and can lie to you and only you.
It's certainly possible to be 'mechanically dishonest', but no question that contemporary technology makes it easier and more lucrative.
SSL certificates, which require you to trust someone you’ve never met with the entirety of your digital life. From your social connections to your bank account and everything in between, you’re putting your faith not only in their honesty, but in their ability to limit mistakes.
Not that there’s a better solution yet, but technical solutions like SSL certificates still boil down to trust, and in whom you place your.
> exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty"
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though:
Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system.
In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables).
In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.
SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out.
For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank.
In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.
Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created.
> In the old days we had paid search engines
I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.
You have it exactly backwards on several levels. Google has been fighting an arms race for decades against antisocial SEO. Google doesn't want people doing that at all both because of user experience and because they already sell the top slots as ads! SEO is a way to try to "cheap out" and get attention without continous ad spending and keyword selections. SEO existed before Google was ascendant - remember keyword peppering on irrelevant pages to get clicks on altavista and askjeeves?
If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?
You sound like you might not have been using search engines before Google, because SEO predates Google by... well since the invention of the search engine. People were gaming Yahoo, AltaVista, etc and selling their services to do so long before PageRank was a thing.
People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect.
Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.
I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.
Yes, I've been saying for years that there's a fundamental contradiction in the paid search model. If the best content moves to the top organically, it doesn't need to pay, so only the not-best content will pay, which degrades search results. So, Google has perverse incentive to put the best content not at the top so it can force them to pay go get to the top. (The same dynamic applies on FB feeds, although the definition of "best" there is fuzzier.)
The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.
SEO is a racket. Google controls >90% of the search engine market, globally.
That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open.
The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures.
Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right.
If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.
> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.
Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website.
If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.
It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.
The restaurants we typically order from (all 3-5 of them), the first hit on google is an organic search result for that restaurant. No ads even. In some cases, it's the first two organic results (a main website, and then a direct link to their menu on that same website, which for some reason shows up as two different organic search results - I don't even mean sitelinks or the new indented stuff, I mean full on bona fide second organic search result for the same domain).
The only one that I usually order from for which this isn't the case doesn't actually have their own website.
So in some cases this is working.
What doesn't work for me is searching for the type of food - that's all aggregator sites.
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives
They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.
What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
> Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
On desktop, maybe.
Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now:
I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App" and "Continue to mobile site." I say ostensibly, because I don't get the chance to choose before a second tab opens up with a strange URL that causes iOS to open up the app store to their app.
I close the app store and go back to Safari and click "continue to mobile site". There are some results listed. I click "map".
Yelp asks me for my location. I allow it. It shows me results for San Francisco. I'm about 30 miles away on the peninsula. Now, I know I searched for San Francisco, and maybe that's what I want. But then what is Yelp even doing with my location?
At the bottom is an add for their iOS App. I click "x" to close it. Nothing happens. After four clicks, it finally leaves.
I click "Filters", select "Open Now" and submit.
Yelp asks for my location again. I allow it. It now shows me the results that are open, still ranging from SF to Colma. (So again, I have no idea what they're doing with my location.)
I click on a result. In this case, Golden Boy Pizza. I click on a photo. I scroll a few photos. On the sixth photo, I am presented the option of viewing all 3427 photos ...in the app.
I scroll down to look at reviews. Oh, those stars aren't reviews for this restaurant. They're sponsored suggestions. I scroll down further. I click a review that looks interesting because I want to read the whole thing.
...it takes me back to the app store without even a prompt.
---
So, yeah, it's technically 'trivial' in the sense that you can get a list. But to actually use that list, you have to worry if any random click is going to take you away from the website. Some of the information you want is completely inaccessible without installing their software. (And even if you go through it all, there's no guarantee Yelp's information is current either.) Even if I trusted Yelp, I'd rather use any other method to find a pizza place.
You're assuming that Google's algorithm treats a small restaurant website and a site like Seamless equally based on the same SEO ranking factors. That assumption ignores some important factors;
- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.
- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.
- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.
- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.
It's actually Google and Bing that are winning. Everyone else is losing to various degrees.
"SEO" depends on a wide array of factors, such as mobile-friendliness and a semantic link structure. But what ultimately ends up winning are established domains with tons of indexable pages. Backlinks matter, but the difference is negligible for sites that operate on the scale of Yelp.
If an aggregator's page appears before yours on the organic search results, your only choice is to pay Google or Bing to put your listing at the top.
If you are a random restaurant, your 3-page website is never going to beat Yelp.
perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it
The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.
I've seen something like this play out twice already. The first round was quite some years back with Facebook pages beating the restaurants' own websites. Facebook's SEO was so much better than the average website that many businesses, including restaurants, eventually gave up and just put everything on Facebook.
The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link.
In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).
Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
For me, the shady business practices are not the reason I don't use Yelp. The big problem is that people are bad at reviewing restaurants. Everyone has different assumptions and standards, so the rating is generally meaningless. I see things like "1 Star. Server gave me a dirty look after I didn't tip them, because I don't believe in tipping." In cases like that, the problem is you, not the restaurant! For things as subjective as whether or not the food was worth the price, you have to provide supporting evidence ("show, don't tell"), and while professional reviewers do this, amateur reviewers never do. There is no way to use the data to make a good decision, and it seems even less possible to use the data to decide "which restaurant should I go to right now".
To some extent, all reviews are like this. I cringe when tech reviewers measure WiFi routers and tell me about throughput (that comes at the cost of latency), or Amazon reviewers bought the completely wrong product and obviously didn't like it.
I hate to say it, but I don't think reviews are "a thing". They make people feel good and probably drive more sales ("it had 5 stars, so I bought it"), but I don't feel like reviews have ever saved me time. I wish I could stop seeing them. (Maybe I should write a Chrome extension to remove them.)
It's only worthy of seeing pictures of food to gauge portion sizes imo. Sometimes I want to know if the restaurant is one to leave me hungry after spending $14 or feed me lunch twice.
My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is.
While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.
I believe it's the wider SV business model of 'platformization' that eventually gives rise to these types of mafia tactics as you say.
It was never going to be enough for Yelp's investors for them to simply replace the physical Yellow Pages. To monetize (sell ads), they had to be the start and end point for every customer in their search for a local business. That's why they started harassing you to download the app or set up an account if you opened a page on your phone; to build a base of users who'd open the app first, and not a search engine or something to look up a location.
Now that the restaurant and personal services industry is dependent on having a positive Yelp presence, Yelp appears to be pressing their advantage further by becoming a middleman, taking a cut of every deal made on 'their' platform.
"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it's really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over.
Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same.
Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
> The Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me.
At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
As far as I recall, Yelp predates Google having any of those features at all.
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
Yelp as a social network is actually pretty cool, if you get their elite status for the year you get invited to some pretty fun free events, and I know they've done socially distanced ones since the pandemic, I heard about a murder mystery somewhere. Now that I don't participate in that I don't really use the platform often.
We drove up the Oregon coast and my GF used Yelp to find good places for us to stop and eat. I was frankly astonished as, like you, I've found Yelp pretty useless at best.
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
They - Grubhub not Yelp - record every phone call, as the article points out, and even make it available to the restaurants, with personal details censored (unless of course their algorithms fuck up, and it does fuck up).
So chances are if you ever called via Yelp into one of such Grubhub numbers, they got at least your voice and your food preferences (which might include medical/dietary needs) on record, maybe even your full details and CC number etc (depending on the quality of their automated censoring algorithms and on whether or not they store the original unredacted calls as well).
“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”, as their phone robot tells you :P
The bill would make more sense if it was against companies like Yelp misleading both customers and restaurants that they are calling eachother directly.
i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless.
edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
I can give you a case in point: we just tried to order Thai on Saturday from one of our favorite restaurants. They were short staffed in the kitchen and the wait time was over an hour... so we didn't order. I'm willing to bet a ton of other people did the same thing. Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
When I order from a local restaurant, I want THEM to get my money, not somebody in sili valley.
Yelp skims using this man-in-the-middle attack on the restaurant's telephones. (Payment card companies skim too, but there's a lot of competition in that field so it's under control.)
Yelp might argue that I, the purchaser, am not hurt by their shenanigans, so I shouldn't worry about it. But, on the contrary, I am hurt when my local restaurants have their margins shaved. Several have had to close their doors in my neighborhood. How am I hurt? For one thing I like the restaurants that closed. For another, I have neighbors and friends among restaurant owners and workers. For a third, some of my tax and charity money goes to helping unemployed people.
AT THE VERY LEAST Yelp's recorded announcement ("awesomeness???") should inform me that I'm going through a third party.
My local telco just delivered a printed Yellow Pages book for the first time in many years. I'm going to use it. I'm going to keep the takeout menus I get.
I wonder if this can be called "wire fraud" in some new telecom regulations?
When 2 extortionists (Yelp and Grubhub) meet, what you get is extortion 2.0.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
When the post dot-com wave of consumer companies arrived, they found a market that was more likely to trust them - the scrappy underdog - than the big, evil corporation. They were a breath of fresh air. A needed change in a stale ecosystem.
Jon Favreau said he based Iron Man off of Elon Musk. Tech was cool. And more importantly trusted.
And then Yelp & co arrived. Uber at least had the decency to start out by screwing over the competition. They did their best to avoid screwing over the customers. But Yelp? Yelp doesn't give a fuck.
They're ratfuckers to the core, and they'll torch everyone and everything if it helps them get a quarterly bonus.
Readit News
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
[edited for punctuation]
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_register
In fact, it might cost them money because it facilitates returns.
Businesses don't care if they give you a receipt.
They care if a receipt was generated by the machine, and are a check on the employee.
those signs "if we didn't give you a receipt your meal is free" take on a different meaning in that light.
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
It's the result of hiding the process from users under the name of convenience.
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black poor people in buses could not [1, p123].
These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
[1] "Do Artifacts have politics" https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book.
Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough.
One could argue that Google has been exploiting this since the creation of AdWords: they will happily sell the right to advertise on a search for your exact company name to a competitor, a nice income stream which verges on extortion.
It's even possible to deliver personalized dishonest results; applications including search engines know who you are, and can lie to you and only you.
It's certainly possible to be 'mechanically dishonest', but no question that contemporary technology makes it easier and more lucrative.
Perhaps there is a business model for bespoke extended validation ssl certs where, for example, they are tied to a physical address.
Not that there’s a better solution yet, but technical solutions like SSL certificates still boil down to trust, and in whom you place your.
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
As part of the public I more expect almost everything internet to be biased by commercial interests. Best you can do is seek out the less corrupted.
A paper trail keeps people honest to some degree, too.
Dead Comment
Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system.
In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables).
In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out.
For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank.
In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?
Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created.
> In the old days we had paid search engines
I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.
If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?
Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.
I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.
TLDR; You need more people involved.
The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.
That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open.
The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.
This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures.
Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right.
If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.
"Is this Restaurant X?"
"I can help you place an order!"
"But is this Restaurant X?"
"I can take your X order when ready!"
This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.
Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.
https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...
If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.
It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.
A better experience for everyone.
The only one that I usually order from for which this isn't the case doesn't actually have their own website.
So in some cases this is working.
What doesn't work for me is searching for the type of food - that's all aggregator sites.
They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.
What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
On desktop, maybe.
Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now:
I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App" and "Continue to mobile site." I say ostensibly, because I don't get the chance to choose before a second tab opens up with a strange URL that causes iOS to open up the app store to their app.
I close the app store and go back to Safari and click "continue to mobile site". There are some results listed. I click "map".
Yelp asks me for my location. I allow it. It shows me results for San Francisco. I'm about 30 miles away on the peninsula. Now, I know I searched for San Francisco, and maybe that's what I want. But then what is Yelp even doing with my location?
At the bottom is an add for their iOS App. I click "x" to close it. Nothing happens. After four clicks, it finally leaves.
I click "Filters", select "Open Now" and submit.
Yelp asks for my location again. I allow it. It now shows me the results that are open, still ranging from SF to Colma. (So again, I have no idea what they're doing with my location.)
I click on a result. In this case, Golden Boy Pizza. I click on a photo. I scroll a few photos. On the sixth photo, I am presented the option of viewing all 3427 photos ...in the app.
I scroll down to look at reviews. Oh, those stars aren't reviews for this restaurant. They're sponsored suggestions. I scroll down further. I click a review that looks interesting because I want to read the whole thing.
...it takes me back to the app store without even a prompt.
---
So, yeah, it's technically 'trivial' in the sense that you can get a list. But to actually use that list, you have to worry if any random click is going to take you away from the website. Some of the information you want is completely inaccessible without installing their software. (And even if you go through it all, there's no guarantee Yelp's information is current either.) Even if I trusted Yelp, I'd rather use any other method to find a pizza place.
- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.
- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.
- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.
- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.
"SEO" depends on a wide array of factors, such as mobile-friendliness and a semantic link structure. But what ultimately ends up winning are established domains with tons of indexable pages. Backlinks matter, but the difference is negligible for sites that operate on the scale of Yelp.
If an aggregator's page appears before yours on the organic search results, your only choice is to pay Google or Bing to put your listing at the top.
If you are a random restaurant, your 3-page website is never going to beat Yelp.
perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it
The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link.
In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).
Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
To some extent, all reviews are like this. I cringe when tech reviewers measure WiFi routers and tell me about throughput (that comes at the cost of latency), or Amazon reviewers bought the completely wrong product and obviously didn't like it.
I hate to say it, but I don't think reviews are "a thing". They make people feel good and probably drive more sales ("it had 5 stars, so I bought it"), but I don't feel like reviews have ever saved me time. I wish I could stop seeing them. (Maybe I should write a Chrome extension to remove them.)
My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is.
While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.
It was never going to be enough for Yelp's investors for them to simply replace the physical Yellow Pages. To monetize (sell ads), they had to be the start and end point for every customer in their search for a local business. That's why they started harassing you to download the app or set up an account if you opened a page on your phone; to build a base of users who'd open the app first, and not a search engine or something to look up a location.
Now that the restaurant and personal services industry is dependent on having a positive Yelp presence, Yelp appears to be pressing their advantage further by becoming a middleman, taking a cut of every deal made on 'their' platform.
- Yelp's founder on why Google is a problem.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over.
Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same.
Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
So chances are if you ever called via Yelp into one of such Grubhub numbers, they got at least your voice and your food preferences (which might include medical/dietary needs) on record, maybe even your full details and CC number etc (depending on the quality of their automated censoring algorithms and on whether or not they store the original unredacted calls as well).
“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”, as their phone robot tells you :P
I'm looking for model legislation. Basis for our own bill(s).
I've scheduled a meeting with two of my representatives. One especially expects you to know what you're asking for (like homework assignment).
I'll probably call my state's attorney general, fishing for ideas.
i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless.
edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
I can give you a case in point: we just tried to order Thai on Saturday from one of our favorite restaurants. They were short staffed in the kitchen and the wait time was over an hour... so we didn't order. I'm willing to bet a ton of other people did the same thing. Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
How do you prove it ended in a sale though?
Yelp skims using this man-in-the-middle attack on the restaurant's telephones. (Payment card companies skim too, but there's a lot of competition in that field so it's under control.)
Yelp might argue that I, the purchaser, am not hurt by their shenanigans, so I shouldn't worry about it. But, on the contrary, I am hurt when my local restaurants have their margins shaved. Several have had to close their doors in my neighborhood. How am I hurt? For one thing I like the restaurants that closed. For another, I have neighbors and friends among restaurant owners and workers. For a third, some of my tax and charity money goes to helping unemployed people.
AT THE VERY LEAST Yelp's recorded announcement ("awesomeness???") should inform me that I'm going through a third party.
My local telco just delivered a printed Yellow Pages book for the first time in many years. I'm going to use it. I'm going to keep the takeout menus I get.
I wonder if this can be called "wire fraud" in some new telecom regulations?
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” ― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Yelp is ratfucking the entire tech industry.
When the post dot-com wave of consumer companies arrived, they found a market that was more likely to trust them - the scrappy underdog - than the big, evil corporation. They were a breath of fresh air. A needed change in a stale ecosystem.
Jon Favreau said he based Iron Man off of Elon Musk. Tech was cool. And more importantly trusted.
And then Yelp & co arrived. Uber at least had the decency to start out by screwing over the competition. They did their best to avoid screwing over the customers. But Yelp? Yelp doesn't give a fuck.
They're ratfuckers to the core, and they'll torch everyone and everything if it helps them get a quarterly bonus.
Or, so I've heard.