The problem with Yelp

I have been a proud Yelper since last year, but something happened recently where I have decided not to support Yelp. I live in Goleta, California, which is in the famous county of Santa Barbarba. UCSB is in Goleta in a sub city called Isla Vista which is infamous for the unfortunate masacure where Elliot Rodgers killed six people (I was living in IV at the time, but I was in downtown Santa Barbara with my best friend and girlfriend when the event occured).

However, Isla Vista is also known for good things and it has a mexican joint that is open 24 hours a day called Freebirds. The food is bomb and their nachos are unreal. Many years ago the guy had a partner who had other locations (mainly in Texas) and he sold his part of the business to a franchise company. They had to change the name of his locations to Freebirds World Burrito and the food comparison was night and day. This fake Freebirds was literally a glorfied Taco Bell at a premium price. My girlfriend and I ate at one of these locations and it was terrible: jarred salsa and nacho cheese that came from a jar. This place had absolutely no reedming qualities so I wrote a review on Yelp indicating not only how bad it was, but why it was nothing like the Freebirds in Isla Vista. About 3 months later, the comanpy replied to my review saying that they were sorry for my poor experience and how they were going to change everything (which they never did). About a month after that, Yelp deleted my review from Yelp.com without no explantion. I have tried to get into contact with them, but all of my emails have been completely ignored. I did some research and I found that Yelp doesn't really monitor their reviews and I have found several fake reviews from either failing businesses that are really positive, or fake bad reviews on a place that is actually really good. This lack of monitoring makes me wonder about validity of Yelp reviews. I have since turned to Google, who actually has specific software to seek out and block or delete fake reviews (unlike Yelp) and I have found them to be superior. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I don't trust the validity of Yelp. I have read stories where a liberal pro-abortion group called NARAL was encouraging their supporters to write fake negative Yelp reviews against pro-life pregnancy centers.

See that's what I'm talking about. How the hell can they get away with this crap? I have been on yelp and seen reviews that are totally bogus and they are still up there. I also read an article about a lawyer who got a bogus yelp review by someone he had never been a lawyer for. He now holds a 4 star out of 5 rating and the one thing that is holding him bad is that completely fake review. To make matters worse, Yelp won't remove it even though it is fake.

It is rather unfortunate that this stuff happens. Both for the businesses that are unfairly smeared, and for Yelp itself since these fake reviews pretty much cast doubt on the whole premise of the entire site.

You mentioned Google has software to help detect fake reviews and Yelp doesn't. Maybe Google developed this software and patented it.

That could very well be the case, but regardless, Google+ will be my new goto place for reviews.