As part of my presentation at SMX Local I put together a list of all of the “social IYPs”, or national yellow pages sites that allow customer reviews. There was quite a discussion about how trustworthy these reviews were. Greg Sterling has a recap of that discussion on his blog. Paul Ryan, CEO of Perform Local which runs DoneRight.com, made a big stink about the general worthlessness of customer reviews. But for every naysayer there are just as many, if not more, people who love them. See Jeremy Stoppleman’s (CEO of Yelp) great smackdown response to Paul’s claims in the comment section of Greg’s post.
The fact is however, to paraphrase Mr. Ryan, if there is a system that involves money someone is going to try and game it. So for those of you who are into gaming the system (or just looking for a plumber recommendation that may or may not be from a trusted source) here is a guide to local search sites with reviews including all of the national US online yellow pages sites with reviews and all of the Web 2.0 darlings I could find. If you know of any more please post them in the comments or email me and I’ll add them to the list.
AngiesList (subscription required)
Smalltown (not national yet but they’ll get there)
15 Response Comments
And let’s not forget about some of the ultra shady tactics some of these directories are engaging in.
My office received a telemarketing recorded call yesterday from one of the sites on this list with a message that basically said… “you’ve received a low rating, to review your score look at [name of web site]”
In curiosity, I checked it out. There were no bad reviews. In fact, there were no reviews at all, just a bunch of spammy information and artificially created descriptions of local businesses in my area.
How pleasant.
Michael,
Care to share with our readers which firm made the call?
Michael — Thanks for including us on the list — it’s BooRah, by the way – http://www.boorah.com
Oops, meant Andrew, not Michael. I guess we all have problems with names!
Thanks for stopping by Michael. I made the change but all of your URLs redirect to the lowercase “boorah” (as they should for SEO purposes) so you may want to reconsider your branding 🙂
– Michael
Two questions:
1). Does anyone know if any of these sites penalize a business owner for reviewing their own site, possibly by tracking their IP address?
2). On most of these directories, does your site get moved higher up the list if it has gotten a review?
ps forgot my manners
Andrew, thanks for that great list!
Neil
Points for manners Neil.
Re does the review matter in the way these directories sort their lists, there are a number where it appears to but most sites do not use this as a factor. Off the top of my head I think Yelp and Insiderpages do so but I’ll have to confirm this.
Thanks for putting together this resource. I’ve been working on a similar one, but I definitely missed a few and you just saved me a couple hours!
Well to add another site to the mix, if your interested you can check out MyFriendSuggests.com. It’s less of a local search site and more of a local recommendation site. It uses a collaborative filtering algorithm to predict your specific ratings of places based on your personal tastes and correlations of other users. It also combines a ‘friend network’ to allow you to easily see recommendations made by people you know or know people you know.
I’m the creator of the site and it was done 100% unfunded so its not quite as polished as other sites and since our site relies on lots of ratings and users were still looking to get over the hump. We’d love any other thoughts on our approach to the local search challenge 🙂
Thanks.
Thanks for stopping by Frank. I am sure your site is delightful and useful, and I mean no offense, but if I see another local social site I may have to vomit repeatedly.
Andrew, I totally understand, its pretty frustrating to us as well as we started this before a lot of these sites but since we worked part time at it it’s taken us a lot longer to get going.
We do think we are different then the other sites because of our algorithim for predicting similarity in tastes. One of the reasons I started this site is I hated always having to search around the web and read through a ton of conflicting review one person loved it the next hated it, and the next…
At the end of the day I’d always end up calling a friend and asking for a suggestion, hence the site. Then I realized well who cares if they are your friend, if they have a proven record of having similar tastes then maybe we can predict whose opinions will matter most to you and thus make suggestions for you specifically.
Our results have been good with the limited sample we have, we can predict with about 90% certainty how someone will rate a place.. it should get better when (or if) we get more reviews and ratings.
Thanks for listening!
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill
Andrew, Lopico closed in March 2008. Here’s the source: http://jdamer.com/wordpress/2008/03/30/the-end-of-lopico/
Most consumers are faced with the issues of relevance and credibility when they search using major search engines and review sites. There are either too many irrelevant results, or they don’t know which review to trust. Social Raves (www.socialraves.com) lets consumers extend their social networks into a platform where they can share their experiences about local businesses with friends, and vice-versa. The intent is to help consumers build their own personalized, authentic, and reliable reference source on great local brands and businesses through the recommendations of family and friends. In this context and environment, fake or fraudulent reviews even if they exist, become less of an issue, or a non-issue at all.