Both. With something like a vet or a doctor, I feel like you're only getting the best of the best and the worst of the worst; no one who had a fine time would bother reviewing. I trust it more with restaurants because I figure there are a good amount of Yelpers who fashion themselves restaurant critics.

Both. One would hope that the negative reviews could be more explanatory than OMG QUACKS (and that the positive reviews could be more than OMG THE BEST

Nope.

I just signed up for Angie's List to check out reviews of various home improvement contractors. It's not cheap but it seems like the cost of entry improves the quality of the content. Kinda like AskMe. Plus quite a few of the reviewed companies reply to reviews when appropriate, esp the negative ones. I don't think I'll stay subscribed once I finish the handful of things I need to do to my new place, but I'll go back again in the future.

But, yeah, Yelp is a total mixed bag. Okay for restaurants. I still find myself using it fairly often though.

I don't do Yelp. And I use Urbanspoon for restaurants.

Yelp is often misleading about restaurants. You need to read between the lines and intuit the motivation of the poster, which is often something other than being helpful.

I use yelp as a directory to find new restaurants but I don't put much stock in their reviews, given that yelp has been known to hide bad reviews and that peoples takes on restaurants can be amazingly idiosyncratic.

One would hope that the negative reviews could be more explanatory than OMG QUACKS (and that the positive reviews could be more than OMG THE BEST

In the case of a vet, sometimes there's nothing a vet can do, and sometimes it's just going to be more expensive than people will like, plus people are worried about their pets. So many reviews are going to be overwrought, both positive and negative. That's in addition to the way people tend to only write reviews if they had a more extreme experience.

I wish I knew more people locally where I could ask this. Yelp is not good but in desperate times I do try to glean something from the pattern of reviews. Also I like it after the fact just to see if I noticed something weird about some place, if other people have commented on it too.

I am just worried as hell about the gato and spinning wheels, I know. I don't know how those of you with kids handle it; I'm in awe.

I trust a reasonable negative review more than I trust one where EVERY SINGLE THING was OMG WRONG SO WRONG, or if the person seems to think that the place should have bent over backwards to accommodate their every whim.

A quick anecdote about Urbanspoon. A while back they allowed users to vote on comments. Specifically to characterize certain commenters as shills. So certain establishments immediately got groups of their own shills to essentially blacklist negative comments. Or to blacklist positive comments on competitors. The site was well on it's way to jumping the shark.

I sent several emails to the admins complaining about these shady practices. No doubt others did as well. Because one day there were no more comments marked as SHILL in bright red. They never mentioned their change in editorial practice, but they did fix something that was obviously broken. That's a big plus in my book. And so they have earned a modicum of trust from me at least.

Honestly, online reviews, in general, are only minimally helpful at best, and are usually pretty worthless. Unless something is extraordinarily great or horrifically bad, reviews are all but guaranteed to leave you with no real opinion beyond the one you might have had going in. Be it Amazon or Yelp, it's all usually just noise.