Now you can Yelp freely, secure in the knowledge that there are no shenanigans going on at the restaurant review site—or, at least, none that can be proven. So sayeth the judge.
"[M]any of the customer complaints relied on by Plaintiffs hinged on the customers' inferences of misconduct, rather than concrete examples of Yelp's behavior," wrote Tigar in his order. "The Court concluded that these complaints failed to establish any significant pattern of misconduct tending to prove that Yelp's denials of manipulation were false."
That it is a very good idea for restaurants to buy ads on Yelp is, according to another court, merely Yelp driving a hard bargain. Caveat vomitor.
