Why does a simple review site drive people so crazy?

Robert's story is indicative of Yelp's main problem, which is what sparks much of the vitriol directed at the site. And that problem is that Yelp is a black box. Yelp's emphasis on "real people, real reviews" makes more sense now—surely, as Stoppleman and Co. designed the site, they realized how much control they'd have to exert over the content to keep Yelp from turning into the fundamentally useless Citysearch.com, which lists local businesses whose reviews all seem written by shills and cranks. Indeed, Citysearch has lately turned heavily toward editorial content, downplaying users' comments on the page. But with Yelp's emphasis on social networking, a similar approach isn't a viable option.

Even as Ichinose explained Yelp's need to keep its moderation standards a secret in order to prevent others from gaming the system, she admitted, "there isn't an easy solution" to balancing transparency with protecting Yelp's integrity. And commenting on another Yelp story, she wrote, "We've heard these requests and have begun to take steps to provide more clarity."

"The issues we face are not dissimilar to the challenges Google faces with Web sites who try to get the top search result spot," Ichinose told me. Indeed, when I researched a story on how Google works, I had to dig through dozens of engineering conference videos and whitepapers and, of course, an explanation of the patented algorithm that Google's (GOOG) founders developed while they were students at Berkeley. I looked at satellite photos of their data centers and compared their locations to the locations of trunk lines coming in from underwater cables leading to Asia and Europe. And I pieced together facts from interviews that explained how Google's servers are a Borg-like self-replicating, energy-efficient hive of distributed computing. When I assembled my article and tried to verify my findings with Google PR, it essentially told me I was on my own. And yet, despite its secrecy, Google is the largest search engine in the world and has raked in billions in advertising.

There just seems to be something more personal about Yelp dissing a beloved coffee shop than Google dissing a beloved blog, both by dint of low rankings and algorithms that attempt to weigh and score every bit of data on the coffee shop or blog that can be mustered. But Ichinose is basically right in that the two sites are fundamentally trying to do the same thing. One search for "Google optimization" will illuminate how many people are trying to "game" Google's system and helps explain why Google feels it has to keep much of its system a secret.

Yet Google has managed to seem more transparent and open to the general public. It does this both by giving helicopter-level explanations of how things work and clear explanations of how changes it makes to its systems might change the user experience. Yelp would do well to study Google's approach, to let businesses know how and why their ratings suddenly dropped, and to let users know their review was banned. Perhaps Yelp should also provide some clear mechanism for a human-based override. This is all especially relevant since Google has lately reworked its own social local-business review listings, seemingly to compete with Yelp.

Lastly, many small businesses still shudder not at the mention of Yelp but at the mention of the Better Business Bureau, and all over the Internet are stories similar to this one. Coming from that world, Yelp is already a great leap forward in transparency; after all, the BBB won't accept complaints about itself, but anyone can go here and complain about Yelp. But Yelp has had some stumbles that have created both legitimate complaints and fodder for those who wear tinfoil hats.