There are now hundreds of review sites out there that will help you find the best restaurant in town and the best thing about them is that they feature customer reviews which are impartial meaning that you can see if it is worth your while making the journey. These review sites are a great example of how the internet should work meaning that you no longer have to rely on the opinion of one snooty restaurant critic and you can take a snapshot of opinion from 100s of people. Or can you?

News is starting to emerge that popular review site Yelp is charging customers $299 to remove bad reviews or at least place them near the bottom where they are unlikely to be seen. I was shocked when I read this story and if it is true and this sort of practice does happen then I will never use one of these sites again. It is bad enough to think that restaurants themselves might be out there trying to fudge the reviews but to think that the review sites have a sales person out there trying to influence the ratings makes me sick. There are of course hundreds of other sites out there (including Louder Voice which is the Irish version) that do not do anything like this and try and provide a unbiased platform for us to post our reviews so one bad egg shouldn’t ruin it for the rest of us.

Lets hops there is a backlash to this story and we can go back to the way it used to be with totally unbiased reviews, I thought that system was working rather well!