[yochaigal]

So sick of hearing this - what actual evidence do you have?

People's reviews get filtered because the user doesn't have human-identifiable data - multiple reviews, friends who use yelp, a picture, recent logins, etc.

Find me any business that complains about this extortion, their filtered reviews are 99% from people who've used yelp once and never logged in again.

On the other hand, here's a Harvard Business School study debunking this myth:

http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/10/hbs-study-finds-positive-...

[asdfologist]

What? That article has nothing to do with the subject of the myth.

[yochaigal]

Whoops, wrong link (on my phone, still no excuse).

Here is the one I was referring to: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-y...

The myth is that businesses which pay yelp do better; thus yelp extorts businesses to pay.

The study showed that businesses which pay for yelp ads do no better.

[asdfologist]

Thanks. But as skeptical as I am of the extortion claims, I don't see how this study debunks anything. All it does is show that there's no evidence of a systematic bias in the filter, but it doesn't disprove at all that Yelp manually tweaked results in isolated cases, which is what they were accused of.