Solving the Plumber Problem - updated

Last year I worte a post about local and social search, called Solving the Plumber Problem. Apparently this is a recognised issue for local recommendation services, because while a restaurant may have thousands of customers each year, of which a small percentage will post reviews, plumbers only have about 500 customers a year, so are unlikely to get many reviews, and any they do get are likely to be written by people connected to the business, either positively or negatively.


Anyway... The top rated plumber on the site Yelp in San Francisco, Friendly Plumber, now has 126 reviews, and an overall rating of 5/5 (although to be fair there are some negative reviews if you look for them).

I think if I was in San Francisco and needed a plumber I'd know who to call!

What this shows, of course, is that the rise of social media and user generated content will eliminate things like The Plumber Problem, and twitter, by nature of practically encouraging random and pointless posts, generates lots of data of the sort that did not used to exist.

See also - Dragon's Den and paid search