[rmorrison]

There is definitely room in the market for a new Yelp, one that is trusted and won't erase bad reviews. I'd like to see something where reviews decay over time though, similar to the HN frontpage. Once a review is "off the frontpage" long enough, it shouldn't be publicly accessible anymore. This would allow small businesses to regain their online reputation after a bad period.

Anyway, too bad for Yelp that there isn't somebody in the gov't they could pay $300/month to make this bad lawsuit go away...

[rapind]

The big problem with these type of review sites is that it's pretty difficult to guarantee review authenticity. A competitor could post a bad review of your business, you could post a shiny review of your own business, nimrods who've never purchased anything from you can write a bad review, etc.

When there's more money involved, and when the business community being reviewed is more specific and defined it has proven to be very useful and successful. I.e. Angie's List.

Anonymous web reviews were useful once upon a time before the web grew up, and marketers started gaming the system en masse.

What I'd pay for is a sort of premium search tool that guarantees the authenticity of everything it serves up.

[bugs]

Reviews aren't meant to decay quickly, sure a restaurant could improve over time but many do not and creating online accounts or hiring people for fake reviews is most likely easier and cheaper.

[rmorrison]

I'm not saying that they need to decay quickly, just that there should be some notion of decay on reviews. Reviews from last year are not as important as those from last week, especially for a food establishment. You're right though, there does have to be protections in place against gaming too.

The problem is though, that every company will get some 1-star reviews, and there has to be some mechanism for them to get erased (eventually). This mechanism should be open, clear, and well known, not $300/month to the rating company. Otherwise, once a long-running, good company gets some critical mass of negative/crazy customers leaving 1-star reviews, they'd have to close or rename or something in order to get back that unfairly lost traffic.

[tedunangst]

Except for all the people who read the bad reviews, then write their own bad reviews without even going to the restaurant. I gave up on Yelp long ago after realizing that many of the reviews could not possibly be written by people who had eaten there.

[emmett]

Why do you think Yelp is actually erasing bad reviews? It seems most likely that this is sour grapes from business that are unhappy with poor reviews, rather than any wrongdoing on Yelp's part.