Yelp and Other Review Sites: Why They Have Become Useless

I happened to stumble upon yelp (http://www.yelp.com) almost 15 months back when I was looking for a restaurant. Clearly, the marketing guys at Yelp had done a great job with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Yelp turned out to be the first listing for most San Francisco restaurants that I was looking for.

The website was vibrant, the people interesting; the reviews were funny and it was all a big victory for Web 2.0! I got hooked to it and started using the site for anything and everything I had to do with San Francisco. I not only was using the site to read and contribute reviews for restaurants and other small business establishments (such as dentists, salons and other local businesses that I interacted with on a frequent basis) but I was also using the website to ask questions about organizing parties, finding out about caterers and to indulge in random banter.

I was spending more and more time on yelp every passing day. I was known as a Yelper and with some extra effort I could have become part of the Yelp elite squad. But then I started realizing something was wrong.

It so happened that I was looking for a Sushi place one Friday.. The easy to use Yelp UI allowed me to zero-in into various Sushi places around my neighborhood. I started going through the reviews. Every place had reviews ranging from awesome to awful. Some of the reviews seemed suspiciously good and others seemed strangely bad (I had been to some of the restaurants and so I knew a bunch of those reviews were plain wrong).. I chose to ignore the results as an aberration and continued with my browsing. I picked one restaurant (not because the reviews were great - the reviews were hardly a help because they were almost the same for every place). My selection was almost random.. I was tired to reading the reviews..
This entire sequence of events happened multiple times and I started becoming more suspicious of Yelp reviews.

I then talked to a marketing friend of mine and he told me how all the marketers have become excellent con-artists. They employ all these people who go and write reviews(which are often not based on real experiences). I then realized there was really no real check and balance system in yelp. You could easily fake yourself as some hot girl, become very popular on yelp and contribute all sorts of meaingless reviews (good ones for your company and bad ones for your competitor)..And any system which does not have a physical check and balance is susceptible to such problems...

So what do I think is the solution to this problem.. Please read it in my next posting....