Well, from our website’s dashboard, we can see some of the search terms that brought people to our site.
Sometimes it fails spectacularly in utterly bizarre ways. Their “Best Restaurants Newport, RI” list is passable, though Newport’s more “foodie” residents might take some issues with it, especially if they’re the type to call themselves foodies. These lists are then published online to get clicks for Yelp’s website. It then uses some kind of algorithm to take these reviews and create lists. Yelp has a few issues, but one of its biggest is that it’s trying to create a reality based on reviews. If there’s one place we see a lot of glitches, it’s Yelp, especially when they decide to let us know what’s going in at Newport’s gay cruising spots. It’s when they go wrong that you notice “a glitch in the Matrix”. If they’re the correct algorithm, then we don’t even notice that they’re there.
They determine what we see on Facebook, what we find on Google, whether the NSA thinks we’re a terrorist and so on. In the modern world, much of our lives are ruled by algorithms.
