Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

From personal experience Yelp is a company I do not respect or trust in anything.

Yelp absolutely don't care about small business and how their filtering system works. My wife is running a small business and she has been facing exactly the problems described in the article. Real customers posting real reviews but quickly disappearing in the filtered reviews for unknown reasons, some of her customers have been on Yelp for a while but still their reviews are filtered, while some competitors (we guess) post a negative review with what is most likely a fake account stayed, and are never filtered out.

Like in the article, my wife was contacted by Yelp to advertise, and she declined... Soon after some of the positive reviews vanished!

Yelp until a year or so ago didn't even let business owner reply to a negative review, so the power was in the hand of the reviewer. What is worst is that even with that in place, even if a fake review is posted and advertising for a competitive business which is against their TOS, Yelp simply do not care of removing such review. Another area wher Yelp is doing a really poor job: it is still possible to review a closed business or a business that change name BUT the business owner can't reply to any such post. So the communication is borked and Yelp does't care to fix that. They do mention "freedom of speech" which my wife and I do get, but then how come someone can post a review on a close business, but the previous business owner can't reply to it?? If people are able to review but owner can't reply, it means that their back end system has some logic to handle that, but the code for the owner to reply has most likely been disabled ! Why? That's not really how freedom of speech work!

Yelp is NOT at all for promoting small business, they are in the business of selling ads and having the most page views. Trying to be a fair and honest business is not at all on their business plan.

From what I heard from other small business owner here in the Bay Area, they have experienced mostly the same.

Yelp is what I consider a SCAM and as a software engineer I will never consider a job in this unprofessional company. Sooner or later I think the truth will be shown on how Yelp manipulate their system for their own benefits.

Finally to conclude this rant, my wife business is still going on even with some negative reviews because we made sure that she was not dependent on Yelp for getting customers. She had many happy returning customers for the past 3 years, even if their positive reviews disappeared.

"the value of so-called "social search" is limited to nonexistent because most people in your circle won't review anything."

I completely agree. The other huge problem with social search is I don't have 100% overlap with all of my friends. If I like Alice's taste in music, and Bob's taste in food, searching among Alice's taste in food and Bob's taste in music is a complete loss for me. Instead, I want "Netflix search": "people similar to you that rated Foo 4 stars also rated Bar 4 stars.

Wait until someone links up all our friends' and coworkers' credit card purchases, netflix views, google searches, downloads, travel history, etc- or even just a few pieces of that- then you can start to come up with a recommendation engine (AKA social search) that doesn't require people to actively create content for.

But the implication in the article is that the negative review is a fake review put up by a competing dog trainer...

That implication is based on the fact that he has reviewed seven dog trainers, given two of them one star reviews, one of them a five star review, and the other four reviews weren't worth mentioning in the article for some reason.

Is it at all unlikely that this guy took a dog to two trainers, didn't like them, then went to a third that he thought was great? Or does it have to be a conspiracy?

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edit:

and from the article, the business owner's opinion: "The whole thing is odd," Frank Brader said. "It certainly seems to me that he's been to so many other dog trainers that nothing you can do is going to satisfy this person."

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another edit:

Here's the profile in question:

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

Does anything even look vaguely suspicious about it? His average rating is four stars, and contrary to the article, he went to four dog trainers in 2010, and gave two of them five star ratings, and two of them one star ratings.

http://www.yelp.com/user_details_reviews_self?userid=z25c9Ty...

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and another:

Now the review is being pushed out by wonderful, helpful reviews like this:

"Just read the Chicago tribune article and it's just terrible! Yelp should pull this review!"

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

"The Chicago Tribune article could go evan a lot further to expose Yelp for the extortionist business model they employ. I and thousands of hard working small business folks around the country who deliver exceptional quality and service every day to our customers are being victimized by this extortionist buiness model."

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

and

"Score one for the small business owner not happy with Yelp's horrible filter algorithm. Yelp is a horrible business and if they don't fix things fast they will simply disappear (we can only hope) its amazing how there filter has managed to alienate all of their users (businesses and reviewers). Great article in the tribune, shine more light on Yelp's craptastic system. By the way we are animal lovers too!"

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

All five stars.