I’ve been reading a lot of comments from people on the recent Yelp lawsuits.  Since I don’t own a small business I can’t really comment on the practices mentioned but I do think the entire situation points to a more systemic issue – are sites like Yelp involved in serving the businesses or the consumers?  This isn’t an easy question to answer.  If you think about it the majority of the traffic comes from people looking to make decisions about where to go eat or shop however the majority (I assume) of the site’s revenue comes from the businesses themselves.  That leads me to the next question – can a local search site be looking out for the consumers as their money is coming from the businesses.  In my opinion the answer is No, at least not long term.  Over time businesses will gain more and more control of the content and consumers will not be able to fully trust the site.

At the heart of this issue is the business model most sites use – customers generate reviews and businesses generate revenue.  So what is different about theSUGGESTR.com you may ask?  First off, as an unfunded site, we have no real need to make millions of dollars of revenue, so basic advertising will suffice (when the time comes).  Also the use of our prediction engine rather than verbose reviews reduces some of the bias sites like Yelp generally introduce.  Since a single rating or review won’t have any real impact on our suggestions without the other user establishing a similarity profile with you (yes you individually).  Given that, businesses are less likely to be concerned with changing individual reviews (nor would we ever let them).

theSUGGESTR.com is by no means the perfect way to find a new restaurant but it is fundamentally different to how most other search sites do things and given the angst over Yelp’s approach we’d love for you to give it a try!

Thanks.

In order to provide you with the best personalized suggestions for restaurants hotels and other services we need to learn about your tastes.   We learn about your tastes by examining the ratings you give places you’ve been.  In order to make rating places easier for you we are going through a number of site changes.  Our first is a new rate places interface that allows you to quickly type in the name of a place you want to rate and rate it with just a few clicks and keystrokes.

We’ve still kept our old interface where we suggest some places for you to rate based on their popularity.  Using these two tools you should be able to rate a number of places and begin getting personalized suggestions in no time.

Click here to try out the new rate places and begin getting personalized suggestions.

We’ve made a decision at theSUGGESTR.com to focus primarily on providing suggestions for restaurant and travel related services.  This includes restaurants, hotels, bars and clubs.  Previously our site held ratings for a number of other types of services (banks, grocery stores, shopping, etc).  However, due to the nature of our unique and powerful suggestion engine it is important to have a more focused set of ratings.  By narrowing our focus we will (and already are) provide you with better suggestions which is our primary goal.

So rate some more places and get some new and improved suggestions!

As new users come across our site, theSUGGESTR.com, they often assume the site is like other local search sites such as Yelp or CitySearch.  With our re-design we hope the site better articulates the difference between us and them, if not hopefully this post helps.

First off – we like Yelp and CitySearch, we use them to.  However, our site is about discovering new places you may never have heard of, especially unique places that may not be reviewed enough to get to the top of the list on the bigger sites.  theSUGGESTR uses a technique known as collaborative filtering to predict how well you will like a place based on your tastes and the tastes of other users.  By using this technique we eliminate some of the bias that goes into individual reviews and strictly allow the ratings to find you a place to try.  So why is this so cool…

Imagine you find yourself in a new city for the first time.  If you were to open up Yelp you’d find 100’s of top places with potentially 100’s of reviews each.  You’re then forced to narrow your search down, lets say you choose Italian and a specific neighborhood – then you may be on your way to finding someplace.  However, with theSUGGESTR.com’s personalized suggestions we can predict how well you’ll like that place and make suggestions for places that are nearby that you’ll like even better.  The difference is that we tell you places we think you’ll love rather than forcing you to search for places and decide for yourself.  Using our alerts functionality we can actually email you when your near one of our top suggestions!

We think using sites like Yelp and CitySearch to verify our predictions is a great idea!

Stay tuned to our blog for more information on how you can get the best possible personalized suggestions.