Reviewing Yelp

Does anyone ever review review sites? I don’t know, but I suspect that if they did, Yelp’s would look like this:

15 Reviews for Yelp

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

Don’t wast ur time if u follow yelp advis u will fall into abis and never get ot.

I hate yelp.

I love yelp.

The food was excellent, but the service was slow and the waitress snaped.

TripAdvisor is better.

Most of the advis is gud, but they cud use

I used to use Yelp. When they first started the reviews were spot on. But ever since they started advertising, the service has gone downhill. I’ve been disappointed several times after patronizing places with four or five star ratings at Yelp. I no longer use this site.

I found your picture on the Internet and would like to talk to you. When can we meet?

I would have given Yelp five stars but five star reviews imply perfection. Five stars should be reserved for only exceptional service. Four stars is almost as good as five stars and likewise implies exceptional service with perhaps only a tiny flaw. Again, the rating should be used only rarely. Because of that, three stars is actually a good rating. Not just good, but the best anyone should expect. If you do your job and people are happy with your service, you should expect a three star rating and be content. A four or five star rating implies an extraordinary effort. For instance, say I was shopping for weightlifting equipment. Maybe Yelp sent an agent to my house and gave me a live infomercial on the best exercise gear to buy. That would be worth five stars. Or perhaps Yelp can personalize any experience I might have to the point of knowing what I want to do before I do it. Say it’s the end of the day on a Tuesday and I’m looking for a suitable afterwork activity. Yelp knows that in my office, Tuesday is the new Monday. My boss finally made it into work, having called in yesterday after a lost weekend inside a booze bottle. He had a blistering hangover and was locked in his cubicle all morning with a glass of Alka Selzer in his hand and a cold pack on his head. He was unavailable to help with the orders I screwed up last week until mid-afternoon. When he finally emerged he took out whatever his boss had visited upon his head on me. Yelp knows what my Tuesday was like and finds the appropriate mindless evening entertainment for me to escape to. It will purchase iMax tickets for me and I will then spend a therapeutic evening with the latest 3d-blockbuster movie. If Yelp could do that, I would be happy to give it a five star rating. For now, though, it will receive three stars. And it should be happy with that. The rest of the world seems satisfied with a three-star existence. Why can’t Yelp be as well?

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

The above is not a real review of Yelp, but it would be if Yelp reviewed Yelp.

Sue Lange

P.S. The above essay was posted at BVC a couple of weeks ago, just so you know.