Yelp is not designed to offer the kind of specialized service for movers, IMHO – as well as many other services, no doubt.

When instead she demanded not to be listed at all in Yelp, she was told that couldn’t happen either.

Yelp is a useful service, but is twisted more than a little towards the shitty by the capitalist model they’re pursuing.

Even the link for filtered reviews is shaded in low-contrast to the background, unless you use a text modifying plugin for your browser then you’re unlikely to even notice that they filter reviews.

There is no pretense that the Yellow Pages large ads are a recommendation; they are absolutely transparent in the fact that ad placement and size is specifically related to the alphabet and the willingness of the merchant to pay for the size of the advertising.

Yelp! is in the position of advertising themselves specifically in a capacity as a democratic ratings system where the user of a service provides the basis for a score that potential users can do their own filtering; but in practice they are doing their own filtering and de-facto colluding with the merchants in a manner which has the effect of gaming the system to the disadvantage of the consumer.

I don’t know enough about the Yelp! business model to know if there is motive for intentional collusion or if it it merely a result of laziness and/or incompetence. The result, however, is the same for the potential consumer: They are fed inaccurate information.

It was quite bad and quite obvious since many of the places had barely opened for a day and suddenly *BOOM* 1/2 a dozen glowing reviews. And they were clearly too specific and perfect to be just a random first day customer.

Deleted my account on Yelp and basically only use it–if I ever do–like the Yellow Pages: just for the bare bone basics. The heuristics needed to create a clean and trustworthy open review system doesn’t exist yet.

You have to look at the review climate; if there are very many seller’s with 98% and 99% ratings, a 94% is a terrible rating.

I bet you think the BBB rating is sacred too…  they got caught selling good ratings.

When I visit SF, NYC, or anyplace like that I always check Yelp for good places to eat – it’s especially important to do a bit of research if you’re traveling. I’ve never been outright burned by someplace I found via Yelp, though of course I’ve been mildly disappointed (usually just because of personal tastes).

I know full well all the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes, but as a regular user I also know that it’s easy to figure out what’s going on – unfortunately you can’t always take everything at face value.

I stopped providing my own reviews for a variety of reasons, such as not wanting to provide value (my reviews are good quality) to a company that does shady, nigh-unethical stuff. But as a resource in its current state it’s quite valuable.

I did find an excellent place to get a hair cut via Yelp, but I probably wouldn’t trust their reviews to help me find anything else besides food places.

If these reviews were Craigslist ads, they’d have been flagged into oblivion, but that’s just not good for business!

Sigh. I do wish there was something like Yelp but not bought by the places reviewed.

But according to the original complaint, Yelp actually engages in moderating reviews. IANAL, but this would seem they have some liability there.

Let’s face it, companies like Yelp aren’t here to assist the consumer. They’re here to assist the businesses that are reviewed. If they filter out “bad” reviews, then businesses are happy and a disgruntled consumer is more or less irrelevant.

Personally I never look at Yelp as truly useful since the reviews are suspect.

Of course, I also hate audiobook reviews that say “This book was really great.”  I can read an Amazon review to see if people liked the story, I want to know if I actually want to listen to the reader or not.