Good point, Joe.  Another excellent way to keep an eye on the content of online reviews is to check the number of total reviews.  If you see a really good or really bad review, and there are only two or three reviews on that user ID, you can usually bet they're a shill or a competitor and safely discard anything they have to say.  Tre truly sad part is that the real-life, valuable content is sometimes lost in a sea of false or purchased reviews, which pollutes the content beyond redemption.  So go with sources you know aren't filled with nonsense (Yelp is high on that list), and take anything you see on Teh Interwebz with several grains of salt.

I have to say that I do not put to much faith in reviews simply becuase not everyone has the same taste or concerns as me.  And knowing that people do post reviews to make a living does not help the company at hand.  I mean that is like asking a homeless person if a hot coffee on a cold day sounds good, they asre going to say it is.  Like Yelp for food, it tells you that the food is good or bad and maybe the service was outstanding or it was completely poor.  The issue I have with that is maybe the waitress had a bad day, we all have them or maybe the resturant had a party in there wiht kids and the person that wrote the review does not like kids.  I read them if they tell me what they have to eat there but not wiether they like it or not, just like I like reading reviews about new tchnology too but everyone has thier own likes and dislikes.

but at the specifics of what people say -- because, after all, a dealbreaker for them may be no problem for me, and something they didn't mind may be a big issue. This is more likely for things like hotels, for example -- I'll read reviews checking to see how the wifi is, because that's important to me. The TV reception isn't so good? Not a real problem.

Amazon is pretty good with product reviews -- and I have to say that for a number of products, I won't buy something, or I'm slower to buy something, if it has no reviews. 

I don't use Yelp much because I just don't end up getting very many services, and when I do, I'm more likely to depend on personal references from people I know.

I do wonder whether Maipai's reviews were themselves fake and paid for. :)

And, of course, there's always Google.  I once checked out online via Google a specialist I was referred to.  Barely doing any digging at all, I found that he had been before the medical board on a malpractice claim.  It didn't have details, but that was enough for me decide to cancel the appointment.

"Validated by a history of content."  That's a good way of putting it.  Do we trust professional movie or book reviewers without having any idea what their tastes are, whether we share them?  We should trust crowdsourced, anonymous reviews even less.

Yes, this goes to the heart of some of the biggest issues facing the Internet today...identity, membership, anonnymity, trust.

Today we see a shift from the anonymous avatar driven web of the 1990s to the Facebook era of circles of Friends with relationships developed outside the web, and strengthened within the web.

We need to have better and more robust identity systems.  Already, I check in at 24 Hourfitness using my index finger thumbprint.   I wouldn't want that to be the only way to validate me at my bank or netbook though!   However, think of the ways we trust people in real life...face, clothes, manner of speaking, content, context...now see how tinny and fragile the methods we use online are!

So we have a reviewer, how do we vet them.  Do we trust a review on the New York Times (even if we don't agree with it).  Yes...it's the New York Times for goodness sake!  They have a vetting process that says, this person at least graduated college and knows what he's talking about.

So, I would think that eventually we'll all have to submit to the Facebook version of the web...tigthly integrated with others.  Validated by a history of content.  Reinforced by real world context.

That is an interesting way to use Yelp, Joe. I have looked up doctor reviews online and found this to be an area with limited useful reviews. Where they are most useful is in terms of wait time. That's something that is not subjective; you either do or don't wait a long time for a doctor. It's always interesting to see how diverse peoples' opinions are about doctors' bedside manners. I like looking up physicians I've seen to try and track other patients' ratings, but have never managed to locate the same patients at multiple doctors. In other words, doctor ratings haven't been much use to me in Central Florida.

Yes, that's what I do with books in particular. I recall not following that advice once, and downloading what turned out to be a terrible book: It was badly written, had an awful plot (if you can use that word with that particular book), and I couldn't force myself to finish it. Either the author has a lot of friends, paid to play, or there are many readers out there with a low threshold for quality!

Good point, Kim.  Yelp has a system of recognizing particularly active Yelpers who contribute the community and are deemed trustworthy as "Elite" -- the idea being that, because these Yelpers are so active in the Yelp community, you can especially trust their content.

The problem with this, however, is that the main incentive to be Elite is so you can attend lots of free Yelp functions where a bunch of free food and LOADS of free alcohol are served (by local Yelp sponsors, incidentally).

So what you wind up with is a bunch of social boozehounds throwing five-star reviews willy-nilly based on how good a time they had drunk with their friends at a particular establishment.

That's not to say that the reviews aren't "real" -- but "reliable" is a different matter.

Best way to judge, in my view, is to look at the person's Yelp profile.  It will show how many five-, four-, three-, two-, and one-star reviews that person has given.  A hugely disproportionate number of Yelpers give almost exclusively five-star reviews.  Whether because those reviews are bought or simply unreliable, you can probably safely discard anything those reviewers have to say.