The fundamental problem I have with Yelp is that it's full of opinions, not reviews, and people are allowed to post a star rating essentially in a vacuum, which then gets averaged against other star ratings to form a ranking. "The food was great but the waiter didn't fold my napkin properly - 1 star."

There's a reason newspapers hire professional food critics to write about restaurants and film critics to write about movies. It takes training, skill, and insight to write well-written reviews. Most people who write Yelp reviews are perfectly entitled to share their opinion, but not a professional review.

I remember a while ago reading the Yelp reviews of a nightclub in NYC...two different reviews told two very different stories:

"Oh this place is the best. My girlfriends and I showed up, they walked us right in and everyone was buying us drinks all night. So fun! 5 stars"

"This place is terrible. The bouncer made me and my guy friends wait on line for an hour and then charged us $50 each to go in. The drinks were overpriced. 1 star."

So according to Yelp, that place would be ranked 3 stars and I'd essentially know nothing about it.

The other major issue I have is that in almost all non-restaurant business, there is a hugely negative bias. Who goes and posts a positive review after a good experience at the local dry cleaner? Nobody. But if they're rude or lose a shirt, Yelp's going to hear about it.

This happened to me last year. I went to a dentist near by where I moved. The dentist and her assistant were both highly incompetent. Her assistant for example, could not understand a single word. When I demanded my X-rays, so that I can go and get a second opinion, I was refused at first and then told that it will cost $25.

So, I went to Yelp and put a review about them. To my surprise, I received a call from them asking to remove the review or I'll face lawsuit. I deleted the review.

To be honest, the language I had used was not bad in any way and all I did was describe my ordeal with an incompetent doctor.

Pretty sure you weren't under any obligation to remove the review, so long as it was honest, but you should have offered to at least trade the deletion for a copy of your X-rays.

This topic has come up before. Some dentists/doctors have you sign an agreement not to write a negative review. Even without that, this does not stop them from suing someone, regardless of merit, which would require time and expense.

Also, offering to trade for removing the review is extortion.

In fact, after I had deleted the review, someone legit messaged me on Yelp asking me the same thing. She was also asked to remove the bad review or face legal battle.

And yes, both reviews (mine and hers) were legit. Mine dealt with a true account of incompetence and hers dealt with a groupon or something that was not honored.

I don't really see the purpose of Yelp if reviews can not be 'raw' and 'uncensored'. The reason we all use yelp is because we won't get some boilerplate testimonial- rather we will get the gritty details whether good or bad.

I can see the effects its having on some businesses. My suggestion to those businesses: focus on good customer service

Good Customer service means bugger all when negative reviews are being posted by people who are not customers in an attempt to sabotage the business. (Like competitors as suspected by the company in the article)

Like this guy[1], who posted a sign on the window of his restaurant calling concealed carry holders 'douchebags'. Overnight, he went from a 3.5 star rating to a 1 star rating, with many of the reviewers referencing the sign, and others fabricating (I assume at least) that they saw roaches, fingernails in the food, that sort of thing.

The owner has since, it seems, deleted his restaurant's Yelp profile altogether, undoubtedly because no Yelp presence is likely better than tens of thousands of 1-star reviews.

http://twitchy.com/2014/03/18/backstreets-backlash-sc-bars-s...

"Overnight, he went from a 3.5 star rating to a 1 star rating"

QED

What I really want to know is, if the conspiracy about Yelp taking down reviews based on whether you pay for its premium services. I imagine this is most of the fight with FTC complaints. I've seen so many accusations, but no actual proof of a page losing its reviews, or even a recorded phone call with a rep (legal in most states, one of the exceptions being CA), just stories. I believe most negative reviews are legit and many businesses that complain about getting them are in denial.

Aside about reviews: Everyone loves to hate on how Yelp is biased and reviewed by idiots, but for me it's been better than the alternatives, and the star ratings generally reflect quality (especially for places with 100+ reviews). I usually don't have the same tastes as professional critics, since they often have a far higher price range and pay attention to the professionality of a restaurant, and have their own biases away from the "plebeian" tastes. The sample size of a lot of Yelpers is usually pretty effective in finding good food. ZAGAT et al often also don't review small tea shops, food trucks, etc.

I have one data point against yelp: I created a website for a small business and they asked me about yelp's services after getting a call since they were not technologically inclined (nice elder couple).

I told them it was not necessary for the success of their website, that the decision was up to them and they should not feel rushed into signing up for extra advertising since the site was just launched. I suggested they wait it out and see how much traffic they received.

They politely declined Yelp's services, and over the period of a month I saw a decline in their yelp ratings due to questionable reviews over very superficial stuff not indicative of overall service quality.

Idunno what to believe, but a couple colleagues know people with similar experiences. If Yelp is in the wrong here, I sincerely hope they are exposed and get the negative publicity they deserve.

I am a direct competitor of Yelp and I have to say that the 'reviews' theory just doesn't ring true with me. Firstly at Yelp's size the chances of something like that leaking are high and the legal and reputational consequences would be catastrophic. Secondly, there are far more effective and subtler ways of promoting the interests of their advertisers and Yelp are one amongst the less aggressive exponents of these in the industry.

A system with comments attached with no poster 'real' identity pretty much warrants the dilemma yelp is facing now. What about a (food critics, etc.) system where all the comments come from your facebook friends? Would that significantly reduce the inaccurate info the user will see? People can still register fake accounts to make unfair comments but the stores do not need to worry because it is likely their potential customer will not make friends with these 'fake people/account'. And the one makes comment will be much more accurate because all of their friends can see his/her comment, so his/her comments have many social implications so most people will not purposely write some unfair comment.

Yeah, you usually don't go asking strangers for a good dentist, you ask friends, or maybe their friends. That's the whole point of recommendations.

This will set a dangerous precedent - if companies that get negative reviews could sue the reviewers for defamation, any business with enough money can strong-arm negative reviewers off their Yelp page (or really any other online reviews site) by threatening them with a defamation lawsuit. Even if the lawsuit is fraudulent, most people wouldn't have the resources or willpower to fight it, as it is much faster to just delete their negative review.

As the article says, "Customers have the right to their opinions without being harassed and intimidated," but what about people who are not customers? How can a user of Yelp know whether or not the review is legitimate and not a competitor or disgruntled employee? And how can we know that the positive reviews weren't posted by the owner or his friends and family? Or paid shills?

All of those non-customer reviews skew the opinions that we (partially) base our decisions on.

So there have to be some checks to the anonymity. I think the barrier of going to court is among the most reasonable ones we have right now.

Yelp doesn't know if a review is truly legitimate or not but they employ algorithms to detect potentially fake reviews and the ones they flag as potentially fake are not factored into the score and hidden at the bottom of the reviews panel. Common triggers include brand new accounts with a single review and no other activity (friends, check-ins, etc.).

In the hotel industry, Tripadvisor has had to deal with the same issue with fraudulent reviews so other competitors have tried to enter the space with the concept of "verified reviews" only from folks who they know have stayed at the hotel. This is similar to Amazon's verified reviews since they tie back to purchase history.

I agree that 'verifying' the reviewer is a great idea. How would you do that? Amazon knows whether or not the reviewer bought the item; the Amazon ecosystem is somewhat closed.

How do those Tripadvisor competitors know who has really stayed in the hotel? How could Yelp do that without drying up the pool of reviewers too much?

I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to verify a bad review... they hated the experience enough to write about it, I can't imagine scanning a copy of a receipt would be too much additional effort.

So let then "strong-arm" negative reviews, it will backlash and hurt them in the long run.

Streisand Effect I take it?

Thinking of a solution for Yelp's anonymous review system reminds me of how Youtube approached their problem of terrible anonymous video comments by forcing G+ integration.

Everyone bashed/bashes them for the move, but I have noticed a striking contrast in the quality of comments now: largely on-topic discussions, people calling out other posters to substantiate egregious claims etc

I would not mind if Yelp iterated around solutions involving public facing identity.

Something I'm kind of wondering, how could one verify the claim "Yelp somehow makes negative reviews come in after a business declined ads".

I hear it so much in this that I feel like it's something worth investigating (without wanting to actually claim that I think that's what is happening).

The experiment could involve adding a few nonexistent businesses to Yelp, half of which refuse to buy yelp ads, and half of which do buy them.

A "suburban carpet cleaner" that picks up rugs and cleans them can employ over 80 people, run 60 trucks, and does $12MM in revenue? Are there really that many frequently soiled fancy rugs in a single suburban area?

If they have deals with hotels, school and offices, then easily.

Yelp is pretty much no better than the Yellow pages at this point.