Yelp now has unfiltered reviews.  Now business will complain about the 1 star ratings that they can't filter out?  Should they just have done this from the beginning?

smallbiztrends.com/2010/…

nothing will stop the whining.  like you said, now businesses will complain that the negative bogus reviews aren't disappearing.  bottom line is that certain business owners won't be happy unless they have complete control over any content that references their business.  this whole "yelp is extorting us" is a complete sham to try and get yelp to agree to let them have total say over which reviews of their businesses are allowed.

The sham is Yelp's 'algorithm'. All of my reviews have magically disappeared. All of them are legit and within Yelp's rules for appropriateness. Yelp is good for social networking, that's it.

They had to do something.  The lawsuits and public perception was hurting them.  Sometimes, it's not necessarily what's true, but what the perception is - and that perception (bv many) was that Yelp was extorting businesses to make the bad reviews go away.

so....i was just checking this out, you can now opt to see the filtered reviews, but ultimately they don't affect the overall rating for a business? Is that correct?

All i can say is wow. I think this will probably only make matters worse, but it's good to know that Yelp is making an attempt to address the issue.

So how do you see the filtered reviews?

I like it. I own a business and at first I was upset that my legitimate reviews were being filtered, but I slowly realized that this is really the only way that they could keep the overall reviews as accurate as possible. I've gotten a lot of business from Yelp, and it's amazing how different customers are when they come into the transaction with prior knowledge that you are not going to rip them off...if Yelp didn't filter reviews, the reviews would be much less accurate. I think that this compromise is perfect in that people are still able to see the filtered reviews and judge for themselves if they are legitimate or not.

Sean "Don't come to my house uninvited" C. says:

So how do you see the filtered reviews?
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at the bottom of the page for any business, there is a 'filtered review' button.

it's actually pretty interesting to see what's in there:

-they are almost all 1 or 5 star reviews.\
-they are almost all by 'people' with less than a dozen reviews
-they are mostly 2-3 lines and not very useful anyway

I love Yelp but I am afraid the damage has already been done.

yelp.com/topic/san-franc…

As a business owner, it's a mixed blessing, but I hope it will help.  In addition to the 17 reviews that show up on my business's page, there are an additional 14 "filtered" reviews.  13 of those 14 are 5-star reviews, and every one of them is legit.  I'm not like Starbucks or Home Depot, I know my customers. When someone posts a review, I know who it is and what their project was.  So I'm glad these positive reviews can now be seen.  Too bad the one poor review from a nutjob also shows up, but I think the 29 glowing reviews will put him in perspective.

BTW, I'm a paid advertiser, and nobody from Yelp has ever offered to hide bad reviews for me.

I wrote a few literate reviews, including "cool/useful", but just noticed they were filtered at some point. I'm not happy about that, because it's a waste of my time to write detailed and engaging reviews that no one looks at.

We just moved (peninsula to valley) and got our movers off of Yelp. Their panel truck even says "Yelp loves us."  They did a good job moving our apartment: They only broke one desk. (I moved all the glassware and breakables in my car.)

We were just rear-ended. We got the body shop off of Yelp. They did a good job: after putting on the wrong muffler and cheap non-OEM bumper cover, they fixed those things.

(I won't bother writing those reviews.)

Now, does this mean that real-world services are inherently imperfect and yelp reviews and ratings are pointless except to uncover actual fraud? That is my working theory.

If the goal of yelp was to establish a network of trust, then that goal must remain unfulfilled because you can't trust yelp itself.

Did anyone else notice that the summary rating will say "based on N reviews", but only (N-1) reviews are listed? Are we supposed to trust the sophisticated algorithm behind the reliability filter if their webapp harbors bugs like that?

Whom do I trust? I still trust Consumer Reports to recommend boring, reliable cars. Their testing also recently uncovered a bug in LG washers, which has been fixed. We bought that washer.