We all do it. When we're planning a trip to an unfamiliar city or we're looking for a new hole-in-the-wall for a dinner date near home, we poke around online for reviews of local restaurants.

But on some sites, reviews are serving up a steaming plate of B.S.

WalletPop told you about the hugely popular Yelp, which has been accused of extorting restaurants and shops that got received bad reviews. For a price, says a San Francisco CBS affiliate, Yelp will move the badmouthing blurb lower down the page, potentially out of sight. One sofa store owner paid Yelp $350 a month to bury her embarrassing reviews.

Last year, one New York City hotel was awarded a five-star review by an effusive reader of TripAdvisor. Except the hotel hadn't even completed construction yet. Public relations flacks were suspected.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. TripAdvisor says it tries to weed out these obviously false postings. But some readers allege it swerves too far even in that. One travel expert about Hawaii accuses TripAdvisor of twice killing reviews that conflicted with its paid sponsors. For sites like these, integrity is everything. Many publications, though, don't have the resources to do the follow-ups necessary. Increasingly, the phonies are not apparent.

I love to try new foods and brands at the grocery store, but I really hate it when I end up with something disgusting. Since I'm cheap I usually keep it around while I try and think of a new way to use the item but eventually it just gets pitched. Zeer.com is helping fill this void with a grocery review site which also includes a social networking component which connects you with other reviewers who have similar tastes. This way you know whether or not those Fiber One granola bars are worth tossing in your cart.

Zeer.com really shines for people with food allergies who may often have a limited product selection available to them at higher prices. For example the Tree Nut Allergy group of Zeer.com has several food reviews posted about items which are made in tree nut free facilities including one for frosting which ranks just one star letting others know to save their money. Since the initial review was posted several other users have chimed in to offer their opinions as well as suggestions for other frosting.

On top of everything it offers, Zeer.com also provides the nutrition information for all of the food in its database which is another handy tool for shoppers who would rather do their legwork from the couch rather than the aisle. The site is still growing which means not all of the products they list will have a review attached to it but over the few days I have played with it, the number of reviewed products appears to be growing. Zeer definitely has potential to be a great resource for shoppers looking to save money and waste less food. As the community and the database grows it will become an even better resource for savvy shoppers.

Amazon or many other online stores now routinely allow you not only to rate the products, but also the reviews of the products. "Was this review helpful to you?" Amazon asks. You give the review a thumbs up or down, then they tally the votes.

Have you looked at those tallies lately? The people who write the most concise, detailed and informative reviews--but are saying something negative--routinely get panned by the audience. How is that possible? Those are precisely the reviews I'm looking for, ones that warn me off a product that I'd been tempted to swoon for online. Positive reviews are nice, but they just reinforce my already positive view of a product I'm thinking of buying.

Here's an example. I'm considering buying a Freestyle MP3 player. One guy notes that the music subscription service doesn't work; another guy says you have to use your fingernail to control the volume. I'd say that's pretty helpful, right? Yet the sole reviewer of the first guy voted him unhelpful and half the people rating the second said he was not helpful. Now not all negative reviews are panned. But it sure seems like they get hit harder. Look at the reviews for this camera: Derek Tang's incredibly long-winded but positive review is endorsed by 120 of 122 readers. Only two readers out of 153 disfavor the next five glowing reviews. Then we get to the critical guys and the love disappears. C Field "roughedge" has the clever title "Video quality reminiscent of a 1980s VHS" and suddenly only 14 of 17 readers approve.

The only people I can think of that wouldn't find negative reviews helpful are the people trying to sell these products. I have no idea if Freestyle or any other company would bother dissing their negative reviewers. Maybe we really of are a nation of cheerleaders, unhappy when anyone criticizes a good effort.