A long time ago, almost certainly pre-pandemic, I stumbled upon a little hole-in-the-wall place that had an above-average grilled cheese sandwich, worth coming back for.
I recently found myself thinking about that sandwich and wondering where I found it and if the place was still open. I could visualize it (counter service, maybe in a food court or subway station or tunnel or similar indoor location) but my memory couldn't zoom out to see where it was or remember what it was called.
So, just on the off chance the algorithm would be on my side today, I googled grilled cheese near Yonge and Eglinton.
And got a Yelp page claiming to list the best grilled cheese near Yonge and Eglinton.
There were 10 restaurants on the list, which surprised me - restaurants around these parts tend to go for more elevated menu items. Some of them struck me as places that would never have grilled cheese (dessert cafes, sushi restaurants, etc.). However, the Yelp page quoted specific reviews explicitly mentioning grilled cheese, and some of them explicitly stated that the words "grilled cheese" appeared on their website, so I decided to click through and look at the menus.
Zero of those restaurants had grilled cheese on the menu. Zero of them.
It was all SEO nonsense.
How does this help anyone?? How is it useful to Yelp to provide such clearly fake reviews, therefore rendering it so conspicuously unreliable as a source of reviews? How is it useful to the restaurants to have people looking for grilled cheese visit their websites - or perhaps even go there directly - when they don't have the grilled cheese we're craving??
If this had never happened to me, I'd still think of Yelp as "a website with reviews", and might still visit it or click through on search results from time to time. Now I think of it as a site with too high a density of falsehoods to be worth clicking through on, and it if it comes up in my search results I'll disregard it, even if it seems to have exactly what I'm looking for.
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