Jeff Overmyer of MerchantCentric, who noticed the missing Yelp reviews at Yahoo, dug deeper and (gasp) actually got a response from Yahoo on Reddit:

“Thanks for pointing this out! I work for Yahoo, and I’ve reported this to our Yahoo Local team*. They’ll be taking a look at this for sure. Yahoo Local doesn’t use the Yelp API, rather we have a data feed from them that we merge into this feed. They’ll be examining this to see if and what the problem may be. Thanks again for pointing this out to us!

If you have any further examples of this problem (or any other Yahoo problem), please feel free to send me a PM, tweet us @YahooCare[1] , or ask us on Tumblr[2] !”

As Andrew Shotland suspected the missing reviews appear to be just a Yahoo Local brain fart (aka a YLBF). We shall see if that is true but what is amazing is that Jeff was actually able to get some measure of support at all. Even more amazing was the promise from pkonink on reddit of future support. Does he know where of he speaks?

I would love to hear if any of these routes actually result in an answer (and ideally a solution) from Yahoo Local.

* Team in this context I take to mean team as in tennis doubles team… i.e. 2 people.