After reading this article, and the Yelp blog posts about the issue, it sounds to me like Yelp is doing exactly what they claim to be doing, and what they shoul

After reading this article, and the Yelp blog posts about the issue, it sounds to me like Yelp is doing exactly what they claim to be doing, and what they should be doing. Yelp says that there's a "Chinese wall" between the people selling ads on Yelp and the people managing reviews. Former Yelp employees seem to vouch for this. The people suing them don't seem to have any evidence that the ad-sellers are manipulating the reviews. Furthermore, some of the people suing Yelp admit that they solicited reviews from happy customers, which Yelp considers a no-no (and they've made this clear in public). The only thing the people suing Yelp seem to have going for them is that some of the positive reviews for their businesses (some of which were admittedly solicited) got removed not long after they declined to buy advertising on Yelp. Yelp essentially says that this was a coincidence: Their automatic filters try to eliminate solicited (and vindictive) reviews, and the filters happened to do their thing shortly after these businesses were approached by Yelp's ad-sellers. But there's really no solid evidence of causality. Given the number of businesses covered by Yelp, you'd expect this sort of thing to happen occasionally. Furthermore, there are a lot of businesses that _do_ buy ads that still have negative reviews on Yelp. So. Also, did anyone else think of PG's essay "The Submarine" when reading that Inc. article? To me, it really seemed like the article was biased against Yelp, to the extent that I wondered whether some of the lawyers suing Yelp have hired a PR firm...