Yelp? Bill Kellinger is ready to scream.

Kellinger and his wife, Selena, own Razzberry Lips, a shop in San Jose, Calif., that specializes in birthday parties featuring beauty makeovers for little girls.

Not long ago a party for an 8-year-old went badly. A few of the guests arrived late and had to settle for partial makeovers. One of the store's teenage employees was in a foul mood. Selena Kellinger, who usually oversees the parties, was out of the store that day.

The birthday girl's mother, who is African American, felt the store's workers were cold toward the children and that they seemed reluctant to touch the girls' hair.

She turned to Yelp, a Web site that lets anyone review any business any time, and posted a critique that referred to Razzberry Lips as a "terrible racist place."

Racist? The Kellingers were devastated. "We're in San Jose," Selena Kellinger says. "I'm Hispanic, actually. I have a lot of Hispanic customers, Indians, Asians. I get every range of social, economic, race of customers."

The Internet is empowering. It provides a fire hose of information for shoppers. Take Yelp, a Web site with millions of reviews of stores, restaurants, auto shops, entertainment spots, etc., written by everyday customers. The site has evolved into a marketing tool for businesses, which can pay to feature ads and slide shows with their listings. Some have reported a bump in the bottom line thanks to favorable Yelp reviews.

But the Internet can hurt as much as it helps. In this case, Bill Kellinger e-mailed Yelp demanding that it take down the post calling his store racist. When Yelp refused, he threatened legal action and media exposure. Still the post remained.

Eventually, Selena Kellinger called the disappointed customer and explained that her workers were young. That usually she supervises them more closely. And most important, that race had nothing to do with the subpar service that day.

The customer said she understood and offered to rewrite her review.

"From one business owner to the next" she wrote, "we had a heart-to-heart talk about basically when you're working really hard for yourself sometimes things fall through the cracks."

Yelp says that's how its community should operate. Businesses need to respond to bad reviews by reaching out.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Bill Kellinger, who was in on the ground floor of Netscape and now works in software sales, says that Yelp removed a negative review about itself that he posted regarding the dispute. And the company took down three recent positive reviews of his business.

A Yelp spokeswoman says the reviews were removed because the company's security system detected suspicious activity connected to the posts.

"It was identified that there was some activity in terms of gaming the system or manipulating the review," Stephanie Ichinose says.

Kellinger says he can explain. His wife keeps a laptop at the store and sometimes asks customers if they'd like to write a Yelp review. The favorable reviews removed by Yelp were all written at the store, which would be evident to Yelp because all three originated from the same Internet address. And yes, Kellinger says, he wrote the negative review of Yelp at the store, too.

Maybe you find Kellinger's explanation fishy. My thinking? It's plausible. And Kellinger is technically savvy. If he wanted to game the system why would he take such a ham-handed approach?

It's hard to know who the villains are here or whether there are any villains at all. But what's more interesting is the way in which Kellinger's story serves as another reminder that no matter how wonderful the Web is, cyberlife comes with its own complications.

With sites like Yelp, we have a mountain of information that we wouldn't otherwise have - reviews of small businesses and restaurants that professional reviewers might never get to. Dozens of reviews in many cases.

But that does not mean it's necessarily a mountain of better information.

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(Mike Cassidy is a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Read his Loose Ends blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/Cassidy and contact him at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5536.)