Looking for a good Chinese restaurant in your area? Yelp! can help. Trying to find a Dentist? Yelp! is there. Not happy with your current banker? Yelp! has some thoughts on that as well.

So what is Yelp!?

Yelp! is an online location where your customers can gather and swap reviews about your business and others like it. It is part of a large and growing trend of online customer review sites (Angie’s List, Judy’s Book, and RateItAll are some of the other notable players in the market).

More than a hundred thousand people search for businesses on Yelp! every day. Like Google Local Listings, it places your business in an on-site map, and it provides a geographically targeted profile, customer reviews, and links to your website. The reviews themselves can be a source of free marketing and insight into how your company is perceived, and you can pay for additional advertising space.

On the flip side, once you appear on one of these customer review sites there are limits on how much you can control what is said about you. In response to this rather frequent concern about Yelp!’s services, Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO recently pointed out in his Blog that even bad press can sometimes drive additional business. I can only hope this holds true for Yelp! as well, as it has recently received some bad ink of its own from the East Bay Express.

From comments by both Stoppelman and the East Bay Express, it would appear that the only way that a businesses on Yelp! can address a bad review is by sending a private message to the original poster. There is no avenue for public response, nor is there a reliable means for removing offending posts. In contrast, when someone publicly airs a grievances on Angie’s List, it can be addressed and resolved in a public manner.

If Yelp! can get past its current publicity woes, it is on track to be a major power house of consumer opinion for the under-40 crowd (New York Times). Jeremy Stoppelman has publicly denied the East Bay Express’s claims that his company has employed extortionist’s tactics. While this is a positive sign, it leaves us in a he-said, she-said, situation until Stoppelman opens up the method Yelp! uses to rank and evaluate reviews to the public or a trusted third party audit. It will definitely be worth watching Yelp! to see how its story unfolds.