Your businesses are in urban areas where Yelp is strong but are not in the restaurant category. Do you see any significant traffic from Yelp and here is the $64,000 question: Would you benefit from advertising with them?

Is Yelp still too narrowly focused to succeed as a general local site?

Since discussing this I went back and read reviews and Google/HotPot/Places ratings/reviews.

Google ratings are brief and non informational on the 2 restaurants. Merely the barest information. Possibly good for creating responses through mobile, but not meaty enough for a reader interested in really evaluating the restaurant. On the other hand the Yelp and reviews from other sources were substantive and thorough.

I acknowledge your points above. Google is a giant with size in the search world that is unmatched. Yelp is large in its own right, and according to one market source cracked the list of the 50 most visited sites in the US recently. Regardless it is small relative to Google. Dramatically small.

On that basis, and based on Google’s recent promotion of HotPot and the results in volume…..Yelp will quickly lose the battle for whose “corpus of reviews” is bigger as you suggest.

Regardless, I see Yelp as a wonderful resource, with excellent mobile apps and a very attractive interface. Moreover, Yelp, compared to many directories has done a masterful job of obtaining high Serps rankings for critical phrases relative to the businesses it rates.

I think back to a very effective and frankly an appropriate selling pitch used by our friends, the YP’s for many years (no longer appropriate to them these days, IMHO).

Yelp is a place that people will go to to ultimately buy. If I’m going out. I want to read Yelp reviews. It may hold attack reviews and it may hold faked positive reviews. (Frankly all review sites have them now.) If I’m about to spend my money I want weighty evaluations. Yelp encourages them, Google ratings don’t.

If I’m marketing Yelp, promoting its ventures and selling its advertising I’d quickly move to a pitch like that. I’d evaluate the time spent on Yelp pages. I bet its substantial compared to other sites. If I were Yelp I’d commission studies to see if that is an accurate claim. I’d also go back to that eager beaver Yelp community and see if I can get them to regularly acknowledge they visited a business/restaurant after reading Yelp reviews.

Its a robust site. I hope it adjusts accordingly even if the “bigger corpus of reviews” argument/pitch no longer applies.

So when you take a look at the difference in volume of traffic it takes us back to your original premise…whose review corpus is bigger?

The vast difference in volume of searches between google and Yelp and the relatively new extraordinary volume of google ratings/reviews suggests that “crowing/marketing/advertising” about MOST VOLUME is not an approach that Yelp wants to take….or can take.

Very insightful article.

Google will use the information differently than Yelp. IE to enhance blended and 7 pack results and provide a few good answers…. Yelp is looking to provide granular detail and offers a great interface to that.

But in the end they have 50 million uniques (about what Maps had when Places were there…) with who knows how many searches…. and the main Google SERPS had 11 billion searches with probably close to 2.5 billion with local intent..

If Google’s effort is focused on mobile versus desktop and its volume of ratings soars versus meaty reviews…well I’d still go to Yelp to read in depth information. I would suspect that the voluminous readers of reviews would do the same.

This should be an interesting fight. Google is attempting to do an end run on Yelp by going almost totally mobile and towards ratings rather than desktop and reviews. Can they build out the value of the information AND its presentation in such a way to beat Yelp?

Its not a pleasant experience.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about reviews versus ratings. I doubt if the “buying/review reading” public could care less either. If I’m looking at restaurants I do want to read reviews. Currently my first alternative is to go to Yelp. It has a depth of reviews.

If at some point in the future I perceive that the “corpus” of reviews in Google is in some way “superior” to those at Yelp I’ll change my review reading tendency.

Frankly, in that Google is such an enormous monopoly when it comes to search I hope that Yelp maintains an edge for a long long time.

I am arguing that Yelp started the review count as the metric of the “best” review site. They did so to position themselves. But now that Google is aggregating ratings at a faster rate, Yelp is in danger of losing the PR battle. In losing the PR war they may lose the war… and it would be behoove Yelp to take a different tact… point being that you don’t really want to get in a pissing match with an elephant… their bladder is much, much bigger.

Google’s Hotpot sign in system doesn’t require public transparency just a nickname.

Query “review” at freelancer.com or fiverr.com and it quickly becomes clear why neither Yelp or Google can be trusted. What can you believe when $5 can buy you a myriad of 5 star reviews?

Have you checked out customerlobby.com? There you can get verified reviews. Also, do a search on link:bonneyplumbing.com and you’ll see that Google is recognizing those reviews coming from Customer Lobby. Nice solution that has a pretty high trust factor. But it’s too bad the business has to pay for verified, positive reviews they already worked so hard to achieve.

On a somewhat related note: there have been a large number of newspaper websites that have changed their commenting system over to rely upon Facebook user accounts for login/ credentials. The result has been less hostile commenting and more intelligent conversations between people who are a bit more transparent. If through this “Hotpot” interface Google is able to create more transparency then yes they will win the review war. Even Yelp can be gamed but if Google eventually gets some sort of verifiable ID in place for users you can then call checkmate.