The fake Yelp review SEO problem

 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.

Bring back the Canada Post Comparison Shopper to help Canadians buy Canadian

In 2010, Canada Post introduced a tool called the Canada Post Comparison Shopper, which let you compare prices and shipping costs from a huge range of different online retailers.

 

Here is a news release from when the Canada Post Comparison Shopper was first launched, and here is my blog post from when I discovered it.

 

This tool helped me discover all kinds of new stores I never would have come across on my own and get amazing deals that I never thought possible. I mourned the day it was discontinued - I've never found a replacement that's anywhere near comparable!

 

As Canadians work together to disentangle ourselves from the United States of America, the time has come to bring back the Canada Post Comparison Shopper.

 

It could be a quick, easy way to search Canadian retailers for the specific product you're only been able to find on Amazon, or for a Canadian alternative or non-US alternative to the American product you've been using for ages. 

They could provide options to filter for Canadian-made products, or filter out US-made products, or filter out foreign-owned retailers.

 

Currently, the comparison shopping tools available to us are controlled by American oligarchs and run on algorithms designed to enrich them.

 

The Canada Post Comparison Shopper was a public good designed to benefit Canadians and Canada. In this, our moment of need, it's time to resurrect it.

When writing alt text, answer the question: "What am I looking at here?"

A common piece of advice when writing alt text is "How would you describe it to a friend?"

Building on this, a variation I've found useful is to imagine your friend responds to your post with "What am I looking at here?"

 

For example, suppose your post is:

What an asshole!

[img]

 

Your friend replies with "What am I looking at here?"

The answer might be "The white truck somehow managed to take up four parking spaces!" or "That guy's hat is ridiculous!" or "Remember Jim who used to beat me up in middle school? That's him walking down the street!"

Suppose your post is:

I had a visitor today!

[img]

 

Your friend asks "What am I looking at here?"

The answer might be "A tiny little floofy bird perched on my window ledge and let me get super close to take a picture!" or "My friend who's been living in England came over to visit!" or "I'm babysitting my baby cousin!"

The phrasing of the alt text wouldn't be precisely the same as the phrasing of your response to "What am I looking at here?", but your answer to that question helps you pinpoint what needs to be included and emphasized in your alt text.

Things They Should Invent: web interface for Too Good To Go

I recently learned about an app called "Too Good To Go", which lets you buy food that's close to expiry at a discount, to help reduce food waste.

Problem: it's only an app. There's no web interface whatsoever.

This means you have to download the app not just to place an order, but also to see what restaurants are on it and what they charge for the discounted food - basically to find out whether it even has the possibility to be useful to you!

This is an accessibility issue for some people (browsers can be more easily customized with accessibility tools), a pain point for me personally (whenever I'm ordering food I'm already at a computer, so having to dig out a smaller, less user-friendly device is an additional layer of inconvenience), and also makes me suspicious.

Generally, when companies try to push you towards an app for something that can easily be done with a website, it's because they're trying to collect user data or prevent users from blocking ads or tracking. 

Given that everywhere I order food from has a web interface, I can't imagine any technical reason why this would need to be app only. Which makes me wonder if there's an ulterior motive.

Even if there is some technical reason why Too Good To Go wouldn't be able to make a web interface, they should at least let participating restaurants include Too Good To Go bags on their own online ordering web interfaces, so existing customers don't have to switch devices to take advantage of this very useful initiative!

Firefox's translation feature needs to be suppressed on pages that already have an official target language version

Recent versions of Firefox have a "translate this page" function that pops up if it detects that the webpage is in a language other than the preferred language indicated in your settings.

They need to figure out a way to stop this from automatically popping up when an official version of the page exists in your preferred language.

 

For example, if I, with my default English settings, end up on the French version of the federal government's COVID wastewater monitoring dashboard, a conspicuous "Translate this page" bubble pops up front and centre. 

This is a problem, because an official English version of the page exists. You can access it by clicking the English link on the top right. And the automatically translated version is never going to be as good or as authoritative as the official English version.

Screenshot of linked page, with the English link at the top right highlighted

 

People outside of translation/language intersection spaces don't always know that pages with multiple language versions exist, but they are common, especially in institutional (government, education, etc.) spaces that provide official information.

 

Firefox's translation feature needs to avoid distracting these uninformed users from the existence of the official multilingual versions that they may not even know to look for.

So how do you do that from a programming perspective?

Preliminary idea to build on: what if the translation feature could detect the name of the target language in the target language? If the user has English set as their default language, it detects the word "English" on the page. Perhaps it could highlight it? Perhaps the translation feature could say "An official version may exist"?

This wouldn't catch every instance. Some websites use abbreviations (en, fr, de, es, pl) and some websites use flags. However, there may be a finite number of ways that these are coded, or commonalities to the scripts used to switch the language, or indicators in the metadata.

Another possibility would be to have the pop-up appear elsewhere on the page (maybe towards the bottom left of the visible portion?) so it's less likely to cover the link to the official version. 

In any case, however well-intentioned this automatic translation feature is, it needs to avoid making it difficult to find the official version of the page in the target language.