Yelp counts visiting the restaurant's home page as a "Google+ local page".
People searching for "gary danko yelp" got the first result focused on Gary Danko, and the following results were Yelp pages. There was no link to Google+, there are Google+ reviews that are listed under the official linked website as meta-information. How the results looked:
http://vni.s3.amazonaws.com/140710080638104.jpg
Garydanko.com with their terrible flash site should be glad they even outrank the Yelp pages.
Just because Yelp is known to filter results (pay them for positive reviews on top, do not pay them for negative reviews on top), does not mean that Google is. Maybe Google should respond like they responded to that class-action lawsuit by Belgian newspapers: Do not want to be in our news index? Do not be in our entire index and suffer the consequences. The presentation linked in the article talks about a "barnacle" not a SERP position.
> Google appears to be intentionally serving up search results that contradict the users
Barnacles are NOT search results. The search result that outranked Yelp was the official site! Yelp of course wants to outrank official sites if you mention "yelp" anywhere in your search term.
"yelp" is even mentioned ON the official site (or heavily linked to these pages with the 'yelp' keyword), so it was not like Google was ignoring it. (they then strike-through the term that was not found and report it 'missing') https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agarydanko.com+yelp&pw...
Also the order of your search results obviously starts to matter then. A search for "yelp gary danko" may favor yelp sites more.
The average user wouldn't make this distinction. They ran a search, the results are everything presented to them.
On mobile, it's much more so a result because the right side card on desktop becomes the top card and 1st results on mobile.