Junesix

Citysearch = Irrelevant, right?

Is it just me or is Citysearch totally irrelevant? The “customer” reviews of places are total shills. They still list places that aren’t open. Why does anyone use it?

Yep, it’s completely irrelevant. Citysearch is still stuck in the dotcom-era and developing its service as a portal. But portals only work when they hook into useful services - they’re actually pretty uninteresting for presenting pages of content. People prefer the casual, review-oriented blog+game+social network of Yelp. Yelp is really brilliant and its popularity works on the same mechanics that make Wikipedia popular. No one has done a study of Yelp but I’m certain that it also relies on a elite group of 1000 or so reviewers in each city that write reviews of every restaurant, club, and store. Those are the ones you see with 500+ reviews and tons of compliments and “firsts”. And getting those compliments requires writing an entertaining but thorough entry, like writing a good blog post. To these elite, Yelp is blogging as a game and a de facto diary of what they’re doing, ie. “my life on Yelp.” Citysearch is automatic FAIL because it lacks any incentives for people to spend time writing reviews.

Source: mascarah