Overall, I thought it was an excellent article.  It had a good "hook" up front with the slightly crazed store owner, and then led into a pretty good description of Yelp's impact on businesses.   As a frequent Yelp contributor, and reader, I'd say that 95-99% of reviews are honest, forthright, and make an attempt at some kind of balance.  I'm actually quite impressed at how effective Yelp is at keeping both the trolls and shill reviews off their site.<p>The downside of the Yelp "Anti-Shill" algorithm is that it does to tend to have a lot more false positives than false negatives.  As a result, infrequent, or new Yelp reviewers will typically have their reviews dropped off the site, or not appear to accounts other than theirs - New Yelp reviewers may not be aware that their Yelp reviews may appear to their logins, but not to others.<p>The foundation of Yelp, of course, are the "Elite" reviewers - They are the equivalent of the "Wikipedia Admins" - by themselves, they are obviously fallable.  As a group, you can trust them - particularly the best of the best - someone like <a href="http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=P5bUL3Engv-2z6kKohB6qQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=P5bUL3Engv-2z6kKohB6...</a> is more trustworthy than any restaurant critic you've ever read in the NYT.  I can attest his credibility is untouchable, and, with Yelp, you can get a _dozen_ reviews by people like him of high-profile places.<p>Is Yelp Perfect - No.  Have they had salespeople (typically teenagers or people in their early twenties) say things on the phone during cold calling that they shouldn't have?  Absolutely.  Do they maintain a pretty damn good wall between Sales and Advertising/Services - Nowadays, yes.  I don't know if that was _always_ the case, but I don't have any strong evidence to the contrary.  Just rumor and innuendo.  Regardless, they are a pretty upstanding act these days.<p>I'd be interested if anyone has any real evidence of poor behavior lately? I think this is more like Mark Pincus's speech that "when you are small, and struggling, you do all sorts of things that you'd rather not do - Just so you can get to a stage _where you don't have to do those things_ anymore."<p>I think Yelp is now at that stage.