Who doesn’t like Yelp? Search for restaurants. Read reviews. It’s great.

These days Yelp is used to review most all businesses. And that’s useful.

We’re having a bit of uneasiness, though, with Yelp and its automated filtering engine.

Stone has been reviewed 7 times on Yelp. If you give us 4 or more stars, your review will be filtered out in a few days time.

If you give us a terrible review – as one interesting client has done – then the filtering engine looks the other way.

Oh, you can read all the reviews. There’s a “filtered” review link that is neither descriptive nor noticeable.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/stone-interactive-group-ann-arbor-2

So, how do you work within the system they put in place? How does a company get to show off the good and the bad?

Yelp has no one to assist you in such situations; only a cryptic explanation of why the filtering engine exists.

I wonder how Yelp’s filtering engine would respond to such a review of Yelp.