Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate.
If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" 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.
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.
Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of actually showing my options.
(It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there'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.)
If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" 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.
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.
Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of actually showing my options.
(It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there'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.)