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]

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.

- Yelp's founder on why Google is a problem.

"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.

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.

In the event you call and your menu is out of date, it's a minor inconvenience and you'll grab a new one when you go get your food. I never had a restaurant give me trouble because I had an old menu, usually they were happy I'd been a customer so long I had an old menu.

New restaurant? Yeah, you might end up calling from some shady Yelp number but then you add the takeout menu to your collection and use that number next time.

We don't need the internet to order from restaurants. Plus there's something nice about the time your favorite restaurant starts to recognize your number.

- Open Now (Optional)

- Sort by Rating

- Search by food category, not name of restaurant.

Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232

Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.

‘Publishing’ knowingly ‘wrong’ phone numbers associated with a business, would that cause damages?

What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.

Of course the page of the business or entity you look for should be the top result for its own search query.

The crazy thing is to prevent search engines from indexing it (and getting sued for false billing) they rendered the number in an image-that-looks-like-text instead of text. I wonder if they are doing anything to prevent indexing of these false numbers or if they just don’t care now.

The term evolved well before the current “tracking” lingo.

The more usual examples included yellow pages ads featuring phone numbers that forwarded to the businesses and allowed publishers to count how many “leads” were sent. Apartment listings magazines used these extensively, car ads, etc. - pretty much anything print or direct response web.

While Yelps use case may raise ire, the base tech and many of the implementations definitely are not intended to device. For a long time, most were toll-free numbers, as local numbers were too expensive, especially before VoIP became ubiquitous.

For every joint, there's their menu with different tabs (drinks, desserts, pizzas, burgers, briskets, pastrami, etc) custom for every joint.

The app then tells me when the joint has accepted the order, when the rider picked up my order, and where the rider is. The rider comes to the office, gives me food, I give them money, and good bye.

I can even click to re-order the same thing, or make several orders from different places (when you want food from several places). And if the joint is not featured in the app, you can make a custom order where you describe what you want, and put the address of the joint.

You can even just buy items (chocolate bars, water) on the app. I don't understand why do you have to call on an app. That sucks.

I'm assuming either a service did the "register a domain for all the local restaurants" trick, or they switched restaurant hosting providers and the domain changed but not the top result in Google, or something else.

It's literally the same business model that grubhub/yelp have- misrepresenting myself as another company in order to make money- but turned around on them.

And maybe to make it more fun, if nobody pays then I'll just redirect the user to 4chan or some other ugly corner of the internet.

I’d encourage you to do the same and tell your friends too.

As a user, their “sponsored” section showing me Subway ads when searching for something in an entirely different class is starting to annoy me. If I missed their “Sponsored” title, I would assume there were no results matching what I am looking for.

If not, someones else will control the stream of inflow, and you are at their mercy.

Getting the customer is always the hardest part.

1) not only are you faced with downloadin the yelp app to look at more pictures which are present on the first page but

2) after reading articles like these i'm in concern that instead of supporting my local mom and pop restaurants i'm now being routed intentionally through god knows who.

i know this is yelp article, but apple and other companies relie on yelp, and if they choke off this behavior it would be a good step to correcting it.

Why are they still in business?

Some smaller shops don't have websites, though, or at least not very good ones.

Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232

It won't take too long before people just quit trusting Google search results. That's probably for the best, unless you're Google, which is why I'm surprised they haven't nipped this practice in the bud.

Is it weird that Yelp has made referral codes for phone calls?

You have no right to free speech with a private company. Stop talking about it.

They don't want you publish your phone numbers, they don't have to.

Relevant XKCD -

https://xkcd.com/1357/