There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there?
They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad.
They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes.
Following up on the last idea They could have tried to auto cluster reviewers. (people who rated these 5 places as having good taste also liked ...)
the could have scanned menus so you could ask "where can I get a pepperoni pizza at 3am" instead of at best being able to look up "pizza" and figure the rest out yourself.
How about "where can I get a table for 10". How about partner with as many restaurants as possible so I can ask "who's still got a table for 4 for steak and win between 7 and 9pm tonight"
And maybe nothing would save them but I at least for me reviews make sense on Google maps. That yelp couldn't see their audience was going to dry up seems no different than newspaper classifieds and Craigslist. Their quality certainly isn't better so ATM there is zero reason to go there.
You are right, at least in the traditional anti-trust-ish legal sense as I understand it.
In a wider more pedestrian sense, there is a some kettle-pot-black involved here, at least in my opinion.
Yelp's a little monopolistic middle man. Everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp because everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp. Market dominance today is the main ingredient for dominance tomorrow. Everyone uses Google search, maps, phones etc. Google gets all the data & ad revenue. They use this to maintain their dominance.
Pick your euphemism for this position: momentum, network effects, buffet's moat, thiel's-monopoly, dominance, viral feedback loops.... Whatever you call it, a restaurant can't opt out of yelp, just like a website can't opt out of google. Their rules are the rules. There is no option B.
A downstream company can be harmed when Google competes direct (AKA the terror of 2006), when they redirect traffic to alternative web pages or disrupts market dominance downstream, intentionally or otherwise.
This is like Yelp's relationship with restaurants. Yelp can stop sending a restaurant customers. Google can stop sending Yelp users. There are no "market dynamics," no "invisible hands," price signals or whatnot. There is no "market" to impose discipline in the way the laissez-faire idealization does on paper.
So... I'm kind of torn. I want to see far more complaints, cases & legislation targeting market dominance, size and monopoly. On the other hand, the hypocrisy...
You're right. This is a kettle-pot issue.
So how come so many arguments here get reduced to "I side with kettle!"
Yelp is bad. Google is bad. Or more precisely, both are amoral, and responding rationally to the incentives of the internet. The traditional anti-trust sense you mention doesn't take network effects into account. If you ask me, network effects cause the landscape of the internet to inevitably trend towards oligopoly.
This explains why the strategy of most startups amounts to "Growth at all costs, until you're the only game in town" (The model of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and every wannabe unicorn running at a huge loss to investors)
I agree that the matter is multi-faceted, of course.
I just wanted to point out that we can't use a competing service's quality to assess whether market dominance was exerted or not. Neither I think it can be an extenuating factor.
One isn't any less a murderer if they kill another murderer.
Should a different case (maybe a class action) be brought against Yelp for abusing its position and momentum to force restaurants into joining the platform? Probably yes, but it would be a different case which, albeit rightful, has nothing to do with the Yelp-Google case.
I suppose, I just don't understand where that line of thinking heads, in terms of an even theoretical resolution.
Yelp sues google for monopolistic practice. Restaurant federations sue yelp. We sue fb for giving us the willies. The lawyers do very well and there's a legal bubble. Peter Thiel automates lawyers, funded by google who by 2026 are sitting on the largest horde of cash ever stashed but technically bankrupt, pending legal appeals and fully tallied lawyer bills. Legal event horizon in 3.. 2.. shoes.
I don't think I speaking besides the issue (apart from the obvious bits). Are either of these companies accused of anything, formally? Murder may be a bit strong.
This makes no sense. Yelp could be the worst company ever created, but if they had market share and Google worked to seize that market with unfair practices, that counts as abuse of dominant position.
There is a dangerous conflation of two very distinct categories in your line of thought.
If think the point being made is Amazon didn't suffer the same fate as Yelp wrt to book reviews because Amazon had a better product than whatever Google produced.
You mean Amazon actually has a product. Until yelp started doing deliveries, order now and cashback its product was a content farm.
I know a few people in the restaurant industry (owners/managers). They all say the same thing: at best engaging yelp ( and advertising on yelp ) is a non-negative. It does not bring enough new customers to justify its expense.
The best yelp engagement I saw worked with customers directly: a property manager ran a raffle for half off a months rent. To enter, you just had to leave a review on yelp. They didn’t explicitly ask for good reviews, but the majority were pretty positive.
For about the same amount that yelp wanted for sponsorship, they got over 30 real, quality reviews that complimented the recent improvements that had been made.
Exactly. Do a product search and Amazon one of the top links even though Amazon banned any company on their market place from being allowed to sell several Google products and even hijacked people looking.
Yelp sucks so not a top link. Seems to be working in a fair manner.
The problem comes with the fact that it's possible to game algorithms. We have examples where a poor service or website becomes (remains) popular, because they're good at gaming the system. Eg Pinterest.
Or in the case of the example they brought up in the video, where they counted the number of reviews you could game that system by just creating fake reviews or trying to just get more of them through non-organic ways.
'In a roundabout way Google are more like Pinterest than you think. Both utilising other people’s content.'
True, which makes me wonder why Google don't just add a bit of Pinterest-style functionality and then start applying search quality guidelines against Pinterest?
I know there are copyright issues but I expect Google would do a better job of linking to the original source - something Pinterest seem unable to do at all?
Google spent billions to develop the huge data processing systems and algorithms to eventually leave Yelp behind, like a freight train leaves a horse behind.
Yelp missed the industrialization of their industry by machine.
> You might be right, but a company’s abuse of dominant position isn’t defined by the quality of their competitor’s offer.
And the assumption that Yelp's offer is of poorer quality is debatable. Google's own algorithm apparently often ranks its content lower than its competitors in organic search results.
The second video shows this: they created proof-of-concept plugin that uses Google's own organic search results to power a clone of Google+ local: https://youtu.be/k9UqqmIJW4g
Craigslist is terrible but people still use it. If Google entered that market and showed their own classified ads as search results above Craigslist's, would you say that "Craigslist couldn't see their audience was going to dry up"?
At what point is it too much? Google wants to classify all the world's information—doesn't seem like there are many markets it wouldn't enter. Is every business just living on borrowed time because the Eye of Google hasn't swung toward them yet?
Craigslist is actually pretty good for some users. It works on a computer that is over 10 years old, it has minimum levels of moderation, and does a really good job of letting people interact/trade in their local areas.
The quality of the site is not the point. The point is whether or not Google abuses their market position. Whether Nixon bugging the Democratic office at The Watergate is a crime or not doesn't hinge on whether McGovern is a good candidate.
Google will eat the world. Whether you were selling an RSS client or giving away a social network, the fear was that Google could take your whole market sector.
How? Google search is the way customers find you, initially and every time they want to log in. If they want to compet, all the customers already have google accounts and they're already logged in. Google has useful customer data: "you are in a restaurant now and often visit yelp, do you want to write a review?"
Lean on 2 or 3 of these advantages, and Google can have a yelp-killer sketched out in an afternoon and built in a quarter.
In reality, Google didn't really eat everything. The web was just too big. They also sucked at some stuff like new communication or social network paradigms (wave, plus hangouts). But, Google's bigger now. Theyve eaten most of the big dishes. Yelp might still be too small a snack, but... the point about dominance is true. Google have a lot of power. If they want into some web sector, they can just power through the marketing & chicken-egg problems that kill 92.6% of the competition.
Yelp’s mobile website is also intentionally limited to force you to download the app (so they can mine your personal info). It’s infuriating. Not to mention the desktop website hasn’t changed meaningfully in years. Yelp is one of the least innovative companies and they manage to remain fairly dominant in their category. I really wish they had been replaced already.
This is completely Anecdotal, but, as a foodie, I find the Google reviews have a higher aggregate "crowd wisdom" than Yelp. I am constantly shocked by the lack of correlation between rating and quality in the restaurants I look up on yelp.
Before it died, UrbanSpoon was better than Yelp too.
TripAdvisor is the worst because it's 99% tourists, so you never get a local's opinion of what's good in their area.
I don't know if any of this is carryover from Zagat but I tend to agree. Zagat was quirky in its own way with the brief summations of crowdsourced (before that was a term) comments on restaurants--but, because it was definitely oriented toward foodies, I found it very reliable.
I do find Yelp better than throwing darts at a dartboard. But especially if reviews are thin or the restaurant caters to the sports bar crowd or whatever, it's not much better.
I honestly don't think any of the crowdsourced sites are great. But it's hard to get much from other sources outside of some major cities, especially if you're just looking for something simple.
Zagat had enormous grade inflation. There were even studies done on it - unfortunately the name of the paper currently escapes me and googling only provides explanation of why it is happening rather than the data source.
Yelp's biggest issue is Yelp Elite crowd. It wields sufficient power in local markets that people want to belong to it and in order to belong one does not just need to review lots of places, one needs to review them quite well i.e. lots of positive spin ( look at distribution of 4-5 stars vs. 1-2 stars in ratings given to restaurants by Yelp Elite ). So either all the places are amazing or as the group Elites have a collective hive mind.
Yes, but so does pretty much every rating system of this type. Most 3-star items on Amazon aren't very good. [1]
Back when they used a 30 point system, I found that anything above 21 or so on Zagat was almost always pretty decent. Yelp seems to be around 4-star+ with less consistency.
> Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.
I'm not sure what the problem is, in both cases reviews are crowd-sourced. So what level of professionalism are you expecting from websites where anybody can leave a review?
At least booking.com allows reviews only when you booked. And when I read the comments most point out real problems or benefits of the different housings.
AirBNB reviews on the other hand are painfully useless.
And Google is the worst, with a shitload of review from people that look like that probably didn't even went to the place, or just disliked being denied on a discount of something, so you jget useless 5 stars review that say "best food ever" and 1 star reviews for "super rude server, worst restaurant ever" for the same average restaurant, and nothing in between to tell you what the place actually feels like or what food is good/bad there.
My experience is mainly limited to Hotels though and I've found 1 star reviews on Google tend to match my actual experience with bad hotels very closely.
I am based in Europe though so maybe this isn't a universal experience?
Yelp never made sense. It's surprising that it got so big. It's obvious that Google maps was going to offer the same service as them and that Yelp would not stand a chance.
Going to have to agree with some caveats. Google's review system is pretty superb. But that doesn't mean they don't dominate this area. However, I feel like this is a space that could still use some innovation. I use Waze for navigation but for informational purposes I still use Maps.
I would be, dare I say it, willing to subscribe to a cheap platform that would do both better.
I’m bullish on yelp still, they have the highest quality community sourced reviews, a forward thinking engineering team, and energetic management. I think they will pull through and continue to be competitive with Google, but they need better marketing!
CBS interview leaves out critical details. Initially, Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn't liked that and demanded to remove all snippets. Google said it had right to show snippets like any other websites and if Yelp says their content is "private" then Google shouldn't be crawling them at all. That's what they did. This caused Yelp to disappear from Google and their traffic tanked. So after this some deal was reached. Eventually, Google just decided to do their own reviews and started showing them in Google Maps. Yelp then started this PR war that is now going on for years.
Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there. I hate Yelp. They are greedy bastards who have cornered up huge content entirely contributed by volunteers. They are the ones wanting to monopolize market in this area and avoid having Google as player here. They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers. Yelp reviews and ratings should be free and in open domain by vary nature of how it was created (and so should be Amazon's review - but at least they are not entirely volunteers driven website). On the top of this, Yelp has remained mostly stagnant waiting for their big payout day. I don't consider them good for users or internet or industry. So for me this is pick between the worse evil.
The debate is so very similar to IE on Windows, however. Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape? Should they be prevented from putting their integrated polished experience in front and center that benefits the customers? One can say that suing Microsoft actually worked out best overall for industry. I'm not too sure how alternate world would have looked like. History certainly rhymes here.
[1] You can say whatever about IE's lack of implementing proper standards but it was the fastest browser in its day. It was truly free no strings attached (as long as you are on Windows) and it advanced many things, for example, it was the first browser to implement CSS, XML parsing and tons of functionality that is now part of HTML5 standards.
> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there
1. So you believe anticompetitive practices are okay when you "personally" don't like the competing product.
2. It is not promoting Yelp when it is the organic search algorithm. The point is that they are demoting Yelp in favor of their own evidently inferior product, as their own algorithm would have otherwise ranked their own product lower in the organic setting.
> I hate Yelp. They are greedy bastards who have cornered up huge content entirely contributed by volunteers.
No bias here at all... How is this much different from the endless other free-to-use websites out there?
> Yelp reviews and ratings should be free and in open domain by vary nature of how it was created
So Yelp shouldn't try to build a brand. They should just host all the content and give it away.
In a fair world, there would be an option in Google for "Show me reviews from X" where users are forced to select X (i.e. no defaults provided). The problem is that Yelp is the one who wants to be monopoly and they would never agreed to this. They don't want Google Maps to show any reviews at all. Instead they insist that people must take an additional step to go to Yelp's own website for reviews. This is unworkable. Reviews and ratings decide the ranking in maps query. I as a customer should have an integrated experience in maps instead of having thrown 10 random results for each of which I have to go to Yelp website to figure things out. Lot of search results in maps are driven from review text, for example, names of dishes. The ratings and reviews are integral part of a map product. Yelp doesn't care about how much users would suffer as long as they can get their eyeballs. Google shouldn't be forced to work with these kind of people.
Yes, I do strongly believe that any website that harvests volunteers to gather the publicly accessible data must give away that data for free. I can never agree to the business model that a company has sole propitiatory right to that data by duppig millions of people in to labor who didn't cared to read legal T&C stating that all this is going to be behind the wall so CEO can get his billion dollar exit to buy private island while stagnating the company.
> In a fair world, there would be an option in Google…
In a fair world, if you don't like the results Google's service provides, you'll choose a better service provider.
Google's search service has always used a business model like “give us your query; we'll apply our proprietary algorithm and return results”.
If you don't like those results, you don't like Google's service. You can ask them to change their service so that you like it better; but they have never agreed to do so for you, and they're under no obligation.
Google should be able to do what they like; users can choose not to use Google's services.
One can argue that Microsoft may put whatever they want as default on their OS and customers always have choice to vote with their wallet. In real world, most of the population is too naive to change default or learn something new just because of technology ideology differences. Furthermore, if I want to switch over to something else, I would lose other dozens of apps that are not available there. So customer is effectively tied up with dominant product and accept it as benevolent dictator. The apparent choice in theory is not really a choice in reality.
>if you don't like the results Google's service provides, you'll choose a better service provider
In the real world, this isn't always a clear option. If I run a restaurant I cannot cause everyone who might visit it to switch to a different maps provider.
For the users, there _isn't_ a comparable service to Google Maps. The competition is fairly incomparable. This is a scenario which is only going to keep happening more often and worse as we move deeper into systems where _data_ is the differentiating factor. Competition becomes impossible when you're starting from zero and the entrenched player has decades of good, clean data.
>The ratings and reviews are integral part of a map product.
No they are not. I and many others I know just use the "map product" for directions to get to places. Google maps was useful long before the integration of the cesspool of crowd-sourced reviews.
You might want a map of top 10 whatever voted by the democratic people of Gmaps/Yelp busy-bodies but there is no reason that needs to be in the core. Google maps has an API that lets you plot things on it. Yelp can plot things on it.
Leave maps to be maps and keep the clutter of opinion diarrhea out of there.
If you search for places to eat at 10pm, wouldn't you also want to know if they are still open, what kind of food they offer, how people rate them?
Google Maps is such a dominant service that a competing company like Yelp will be at a huge disadvantage. No wonder Yelp complains. But you can't say what Google does doesn't make sense.
>wouldn't you also want to know if they are still open,
Yes, but my experience is that, especially for the case of later (or earlier) than peak business hours for an area, I can't trust a second- or third-hand source like a mapping service for this kind of information.
Even if it weren't for the GIGO problem, I still have the UI problem in that there's only an "open now" boolean filter, which is horrible if I'm searching at 9:48 for places open after 10.
>what kind of food they offer,
Sometimes, but there's often at least a hint in the name of the restaurant. Often, though, the later it is, the less importance the kind of food holds.
>how people rate them?
Honestly, not even a little, since, by this point, it's a "beggars can't be choosers" situation. Plus, even if I had the inclination to dig into the reviews, I wouldn't care what people thought of, for example, the service during the dinner rush.
You don't need user ratings to tell if they are open or what type of restaurant it is. That's basic business information that Google has allowed businesses to provide forever.
> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there.
Who is to decide what is a crappy 2nd rate product? To me, Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. Can the same be held true for Google?
> They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers.
If it was donated, how was it theft?
> Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape?
They were never prevented from competing, they were prevented from preventing others competing.
> Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews.
This is a dubious claim.
There have been periodic blowups about Yelp offering to manipulate how reviews are presented for money. [1][2] Yelp portrays this as advertising [3], like putting a "favorite" review "above the fold" so to speak, but many business owners consistently tell the same story about extortion over negative reviews.
I never paid it much attention before, but recently someone I personally know mentioned that her boss (at the time) was paying to remove negative Yelp reviews, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Point is, even if they aren't directly deleting negative reviews, reviews are their main product and pressure over negative reviews seems to be at the very least a sales tactic, so don't be so sure they have no financial benefit from manipulating at least certain aspects of reviews--it's not inconceivable.
Superior? Yelp is awful. Make a better product and it would be higher in search. This is sour grapes and really worry we are going to end up with a worse search engine.
There were many search engines before Google. Reason Google won is because they provide better results.
> Several lawsuits have been filed against it and it has prevailed every time, owing to lack of evidence and a technicality on the point of law.
But does what they're doing have to be illegal to be bad? I think most people would assume that if there's foul play, a huge corporation would find a legal way to do it, not an illegal one.
What do you mean by "proof", if your bar isn't a court conviction? [1] Lots of businesses have filed lawsuits over this over many years... here's just a few of the gazillion I find on Google. [2] [3] [4] [5] It's practically absurd to think these are all over nothing and there's no foul play going on. How many stories do you need before you believe it's possible that maybe not everyone who is suing the same entity is confused or lying?
There is no "conviction" for a civil case, and the standard of proof is far lower in civil court than criminal. Has Yelp ever lost one of these lawsuits? Mostly they seem to get thrown out of court.
Anecdotally, I knew a business owner who complained about Yelp hiding negative reviews on a competitor's page, presumably because the competitor was an advertiser and his business was not. Reading the negative reviews, though, they were _obviously_ shams; it wouldn't be surprising if the complaining businessman had left them himself.
> Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn't liked that
Who would? What would Google do if someone decided to scrape all their Google Maps, Shopping content? Apart from adding stronger Captchas, that is... Google has been stealing content from smaller and better sites to improve their own half-arsed products for many years.
The problem with IE was not that Microsoft developed IE, the problem with IE was that Microsoft used its ownership of the operating system and MS Office as well as contracts with PC manufacturers to give IE an overwhelming advantage over the competition.
Isn't google doing the same thing. They are using their search dominance to get people to use their other services. If DOJ hadn't forced MSFT to stop making IE the default browser would google be as big. Most people don't ever change the defaults on their browser. If MSFT had been left alone are you sure google would be as big as they are today? I mean they took netscape from 90% market share to like 5% marketshare.
In fact Google is doing exact the same thing - pushing their browser using possibly the worlds most wanted ad spot: the front page of Google.
It's almost a one-to-one to Windows pushing their browser by default in the OS that almost everyone used at that time.
Edit: I like some other things Google do but they definitely should talk about this internally an do something about it before EU as well as relevant US authorities wakes up and punish them for anti competitive behaviour.
Or maybe the relevant authorities should slap them on the wrist first; Microsoft seems to have learned the lesson and is a much nicer company to deal with in many areas now.
Microsoft tied MSIE to Windows distribution, if you wanted to distribute Windows with your PCs you had to agree to Microsoft's terms. In some cases you had to pay Microsoft for a Windows license regardless of whether or not you had installed Windows on the PC.
I concede I could be wrong but I do not believe Google Chrome ships with Windows or OS X.
Would Google be as big as it is today? I have no idea, but the reason Google is Google has less to do with Microsoft's antitrust case than with dozens of previous commercial search engines failing to compete with them. By the time the MSFT antitrust case was resolved there was no meaningful competition to Microsoft on PCs and Netscape was winding down into the Mozilla project.
Interesting. I started using Yelp specifically because Google's results are awful especially around the DC area.
Grade inflation is prevalent on every platform except yelp, at least from my experience. I haven't seen any formal research on it and would love to see something confirming or refuting my hunch, but my experience has consistently held that Yelp reviewers are picky almost to a fault--useful when deciding whether I want a solid experience vs. an exceptional one.
True, but there should be a strong presumption that if some company wants to spend their money on a product it’s up to consumers to decide if it’s a success or not rather than the courts. If Yelp gets destroyed because Google decides to give away their entire value add for free that’s no more something that’s no more an injustice to Yelp than Android was to Blackberry, Microsoft or Apple.
This comment is mildly funny. You say it should be up to the consumers to decide the success. But that's not what is being suggested is happening. It's being suggested that one company is trying to hide another. It's like if you have a shop selling something and Big Shop Corp comes along and puts up a bunch of trees and bushes in around your shop so it looks like there is only a forest there and no shop. No one is being stopped from going to that shop, but they are being prevented from knowing about the fact there is a shop and the choice of going to that shop instead of Big Shop Corp.
It’s not really. It’s more like you sell a product in BigShop, and they come out with their own range, promote it and stop selling your product. As a consumer you’re still free to go to the other shops and get the product from them instead (in this case Bing, DDG)
Google Search is not like a shop, where you go to buy specific things. It's like a road where you go down specific routes looking for things. The difference being in your example you already know what you want, with mines you are searching for what you want.
As someone that tried to write a scraper against yelp for their reviews. (I wanted to do a recommendation engine to recommend new places based on what/who others liked and what I may liked, but haven't checked out yet).
They're VERY aggressive about banning/catching bots. They intentionally inflate their search rankings and will throw a 404 against requests for what they list. (I.e. they'll say that they've found 15 pages of results, but if you hit the 14/15th .. they'll throw a 404)
On the other side: You can't pull all of the reviews for a place via their api. You're limited to 3 per business.
> When I want to buy something, I type "amazon.com", not "google.com".
I do the exact opposite, I either search a specific business' site or Google something vague like "sturdy cargo pants," find a brand / store that I like and visit that store.
I've been burned too many times by cheap, fake shit from Amazon. I'm not willing to deal with the hassle and wasted time.
Google really does have the best business model. It uses an auction model for advertising so most of the profits go to google and then user still blames the actual business for the problems.
Same. I start on Google and then usually buy on Amazon. Google has the Amazon links like they should and it is high on the list even though Amazon is Google chief competitor.
Reason being Amazon is popular and offers a great service. Versus Yelp is horrible so not high on the list.
Kind of indicates Google search is working how it should and Yelp just has sour grapes.
Now if Amazon moved to the second page that would be something to put on 60 minutes.
> Same. I start on Google and then usually buy on Amazon.
When I said "visit the store" I meant "visit a physical shop." Amazon Basics aside, purchasing their physical products are fraught with peril. Especially with easy-to-forge high-margin products like clothing.
I have a few pairs of $40 inauthentic shorts I'd ordered off of Amazon a few years back. I realized they were fake after venturing into a physical store and seeing the difference, but I had gone years thinking Billabong had some seriously shoddy clothes.
I'm surprised we don't see more lawsuits of companies suing Amazon for peddling fakes goods and damaging their brand.
That is because you are familiar with services Amazon and Yelp provide. There are a large number of people who do not. They may not know all of the different services (or want to shop around) so a "general" search on Google would be their starting point.
You're pretending like 90% of people don't interface with the network by just using google. The few people who don't do that just search social networks instead.
I'm old enough to type in a URL, I rarely see anyone else who does that anymore.
It honestly sounds like Yelp is just salty at the fact that their SEO marketing isn't as effective as it used to be because of Google's improvement to their search engine algorithms.
Also, it's laughable that of all companies, Yelp is the one complaining about Google.
It's pretty obvious Google has moved against the best interests of consumers, by their own admission.
They now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ads, something their founders correctly proclaimed in the early days to be fundamentally anti user experience. When faced with mobile (and no right side area to allocate ads), they chose to violate their earliest of principles and decided the money mattered a lot more than providing the best product for the consumer. It's merely one example of many that Google isn't acting in the best interest of the consumer with their search monopoly.
Yelp can be salty and simultaneously Google can be an abusive monopoly.
Sun and Oracle were two of the loudest complainers about Microsoft. It doesn't mean they were wrong, despite their own at times shitty behavior.
> hey now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ad
Google has done this as long as I can recall - the top few results are always “sponsored”. Yelp also does this, by placing a star on your map instead of a rating.
> Google was created to build an open search engine that doesn't rely on ad revenue.
> Literally, that's what the original paper says:
So? And then they became a business at some point and had employees to pay and server costs?
So...forget whatever idealism is in the original paper because they may have been living in a bubble of idealism before they stepped out of academia into reality.
> This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.
> One of our main goals in designing Google was to set up an environment where other researchers can come in quickly, process large chunks of the web, and produce interesting results that would have been very difficult to produce otherwise. In the short time the system has been up, there have already been several papers using databases generated by Google, and many others are underway. Another goal we have is to set up a Spacelab-like environment where researchers or even students can propose and do interesting experiments on our large-scale web data.
From Appendix A
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
[…]
> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
It might just be my opinion, but I find the user experience to be far better now that I can search for food basically directly on Google Maps. Yelp's UI is pretty janky, especially when I always end up just pasting the address I find on Yelp back into Google Maps at the end of the day so I can drive to the place.
60 Minutes didn't reveal anything here a lot of us don't already know, there wasn't any hard-hitting journalism or incredible revelations. But given 60 Minutes reaches millions of people, it's probably massively raised awareness of these issues with a significant number of people who don't generally follow tech explicitly.
> 60 Minutes didn't reveal anything here a lot of us don't already know
In my experience, 60 Minutes is less about breaking news than competently explaining it. The tech community, as a whole, is generally bad at communicating its non-commercial preferences. This issue is no exception.
I don't think it served well as completely explaining it, because Android and Chrome were only cursory mentions, and I'd argue they're both critical to Google's ability to control the Internet, while each also being monopolies in their own right.
It has an exceedingly dominant market share (FYI: Being a monopoly does not require "zero alternatives exist". Merely that those alternatives are at the mercy of the main one), which it uses to direct and control Internet protocols in the way it finds most beneficial to Google.
All new Internet protocols and 'standards' proposed by Google come with the implied threat that Google will do it anyways, since often Google implements it in Chrome before it is a standard, leaving everyone else to accept it or be rendered incompatible with Google, who has control of most of the Internet.
A significant number of websites now only test against Chrome and only support Chrome, leaving really only one option, often, when trying to interact with a given Internet entity.
And Chrome isn't just a monopoly, it's a monopoly they illegally use to manipulate the market and boost their other products. For instance, while competing search engines can bid for default placement on Firefox, Google gives it's own search engine exclusive rights to be default there, the monopoly search engine on the monopoly browser.
Recently, Google even introduced a method for banning competitors ads into Chrome, rendering Google ads the only "sure thing" for not having your ads arbitrarily blocked by Google.
Chrome is one of the clearest examples of why Google must be broken up. It's Ad/Search business cannot own platforms like Chrome and Android.
Your working definition of what an illegal anti-competitive use of monopoly power is seems to be the reverse of what I've heard before.
Under your definition, Chrome is supporting the even stronger pre-existing monopoly Google has on search or ads, and therefore is bad.
Usually anti-competitive actions are seen as a player using its monopoly to support emergence into a new market, not to build a moat around an existing market they already are dominant in.
For example, under your framing, Microsoft's usage of Internet Explorer would have been bad not because it came pre-installed with Windows, but because it was Windows-only (or worked best on Windows) thus supporting the existing Windows monopoly.
I don't know if this reasoning can hold legally---merely because I have never seen it used before.
The general concept of tying relates to connecting unrelated products, and using control of one to benefit the other. I'm doubtful the claim "the other product is already also a monopoly" is a usable defense for this practice's illegality.
They did a hit piece on someone who I worked with that was flat out untrue. Many people at work knew the details and agreed. That one experience made me view anything I see on TV with a healthy dose of scepticism.
I agree with you about not trusting anything we see on TV/Newspapers (even if it is from 60 Minutes; NYT; whatever-is-reputed-to-be-reliable). I grew up in Myanmar and after reading a lot of one-sided coverage about the refugee issue there (labeled as 'genocide'), I realized it's impossible for news organizations to be almost always impartial and accurate.
They have to obtain information from some source. Almost always, that source of information can mislead the reporter/news writer easily because of the latter's lack of familiarity with the issue, the region or the culture. The reporter, on the other hand, works against time. Plus, s/he is, after all, human (susceptible to persuasion/personal biases and worse, is sometimes too lazy to do a fact-check and more importantly, to hear the voices from the other side).
As most things in life, the truth is always in somewhere the middle.
Especially since now sources are "someone familiar with their thinking". Why the media thinks that is a reputable source is beyond me and is why I've completely stopped watching television news
The challenge is that when you're reporting on companies with legendarily strict NDAs and entire security teams dedicated to finding leaks and snuffing them out, news is going to come predominantly from confidential sources.
For example, in the Theranos segment that followed the Google segment on this week's 60 Minutes, the Theranos employee who first ratted them out stated that he used a fake name when he first contacted the government because he feared reprisal.
Presumably, reporters are supposed to seek adequate proof or confirmation of what they hear from "sources", and we are supposed to be able to trust that they did that job adequately or at least, they are reporting the news as they believe it, until confirmation is available in the form of an official investigation.
I have run several local marketplaces and what Google is doing to local search is so anti-competitive that many people have decided not to start new local marketplaces. You can Imagine what that does to innovation.
In the medium term it will hurt Google. It takes years to build trust and it erodes slowly over time until one day it's gone.
It's not necessary to be innocent to be a legitimate witness to a crime, or victim of a crime.
Sainthood is not a prerequisite to having credibility.
Yelp's bad behavior does not mean they're wrong about Google's bad behavior. If Yelp's bad behavior needs correcting, you're suggesting that Google's behavior needs correcting 100x. These entities are not similar in size or economic power. They are not similar in the scale of detrimental effects they can have on consumers. A local radio monopoly, is not similar to Standard Oil's monopoly in the scale of consequence to society & consumers, despite both being monopolies; one is properly far more concerning than the other.
Only sharing for reference, you reminded me that someone made a documentary ('billion dollar bully') about this (not released yet, but supposedly being premiered soon):
Mainstream media story about web company? Check. Nothing new? Check. Negative? Check. Of course Yelp participated...but Yelp angle aside, CBS is just following the news cycle patterns of their brethren. I'm mentioning this a lot these days, but feels like watching cattle being herded (albeit willingly).
> There is a prevailing "tech can do no wrong" attitude in the tech community
Is there? I see the opposite in communities including the one we're on. The anti-big-web-company torches seem brightest within compared to the more accepting yet non-ignorant outside.
I think it's not quite "tech can do no wrong", but "all problems can be solved with tech" is definitely prevalent. I guess it's because we're all tech guys here and "if you only have a hammer...".
But you need to use valid examples which the Yelp one is not. Yelp is terrible so not high on the search results like it should be.
But then do a product search and Amazon a top result returned even though Amazon banned any company on their market place from selling a bunch of Google products.
It is just Yelp sour grapes. If going to accuse Google think you might use a valid example.
I don't think the vast majority of 60 minutes viewers would have been aware about any of the details mentioned in this piece. Not everybody follows Google anti-trust chatter.
Google recently started showing job postings in their search results (at least here in Canada). I suppose this will affect indeed.com, monster.com, and a site I had stake in. I love monetizing niche search engines and other data products, but it looks like Google will eventually get into any industry where the main source of traffic is organic search, I wonder what is next.
But that's not the case in other markets. Travel to Australia, and you'll find that basically the only reviews are from Americans. All the Australians use Google.
Which makes Yelp in Australia GREAT for Americans. A feature I wish they would build out officially. I like seeing how other people like me rate things. When someone says, "The pizza ain't like home." I know to trust that person if they're from NY. Or, how the Texans ranked local brisket, how people who spoke German rated the schnitzel, or how people from states that grow apples rank apple pie. A million other examples. Profoundly useful for finding good reviews.
Anyway neither Google or Yelp offer this feature, and it seems so fundamentally easy to build out. Just aggregate reviews by reviewer meta-data, no? Or something as simple as, "Show me where people who rated this place a 5 also ate." Mix in "check-ins" (and tie those to discount tiers, since Yelp can) and you can start seeing, "Show me places where people rate 5, and actually return regularly..." This stuff makes for powerful reviews. You don't need first names, you don't need to worry about fake reviewers... they have my credit card linked to them, and if that serves as a reward system... anyway Google and Yelp are both missing the boat on a lot of this stuff.
I really despise how they both make me use a "real" name now. No way I want friends and family seeing what I write. If a place sucks, I want to be free to trash it without fear of someone saying, "Hey {person with a fairly unique first name who is fairly well-known in a relatively small community}, why did you trash my pizza?" or, "Hey Mr. Regular, why haven't you written me a review yet?" or, "Hey Grandson, I see that you're reviewing the same BDSM shop your grandfather and I love!" Ha. Having real IDs on the web... creepy as fuck.
That's what I've found about travelling out of the US. Tripadvisor is good/decent. Although it's gamed a lot.
Yelp is TERRIBLE for food choices. In the Caribbean, you'll see how bad it is. (There aren't a lot of reviews and the places that are reviewed are really bad)
The whole piece looks & feels like a documentary that could have been aired during the Dotcom bubble. Looking forward to watching this in twenty years from now.
Hasn't Yelp forced businesses to pay or else they'll showcase the negative reviews more than the positive ones?
Pot calling the kettle black when it comes to abusing dominance.
Yelp has a point. Google, and largely Larry Page's insistence on shortening the time between query and answer is starting to stumble under the reality that the source data Google utilizes for its own services isn't the best there is as Yelp rightly laid out. It may be wise for Google to back off on some touchy verticals or to integrate 3rd party data sources to stymie any attempts by regulators to flex. This is the perfect populist opportunity for any public official to run on. Maybe this will take some of the heat off of Amazon for a minute.
I get calls from yelp sales which I would call nothing short of predatory, to the point where I literally put on my website a notice to yelp staff to stop calling me.
Using Duck Duck Go, nearly all my top search results are Yelp, and that is at times enough to make me use Google. (Yes, for every search I could type -yelp but that gets painful.) It's clear that the way Yelp indexes, that Google is doing something to push it down. The question is whether that is purely to squash their competition, or because people don't actually want Yelp results. I'm not suggesting the former is not the case.
I use Yelp all the time. I’ve never even considered using Google maps as a replacement for Yelp.
But I just tried it and you know what? I think I might switch. I just did a search for “lunch” from my house, and it came up with all my favorite places. (I know this could be because it’s using what it knows about my location data to suggest places I’ve been to frequently, which is why I’m not totally sold yet).
I’ll try using both for a while and see how it goes.
This is ironic. Yelps complaint about Google, is the same I have heard from a few small business owners I have worked with.
One customer had over 50% of their legitimate reviews that they worked so incredibly hard for, gone in one day. In trying to appeal, Yelps canned response was its due to our algorithm and there isn’t anything we can do. My customer was in tears over this issue.
i thought it was pretty funny during their demonstration of how bad google was, they googled "san francisco restaurants" (or something like that), and there on the auto-complete was "san francisco restaurants YELP", like, dude, this website that is so evil is advertising for you, right there, in the box where you're typing!
Google reviews can’t be trusted either. Google reviews can be removed, I worked for a company that would work to remove all the bad reviews by real clients then pay people overseas to leave 5 star reviews.
They have a point but this really is the best example of the pot calling the kettle black that I'm aware of. Yelp and Google both abuse their dominance.
Are becoming? ...How else do you think they have been making money all these years? It’s their oldest and most profitable product and it’s called AdWords. The foundation of what we know as Google.
Yeah. I consider Google to be first and foremost very much an ad company. Search is just the vehicle they use to fill their shelves with product, "you" that they're selling to advertisers.
I didn't see the majority of the piece because the kids were acting up, but I must be missing something. Why is this a big deal when it's the SAME company's browser that the user is using that is showing products/services at the top for the SAME company's products?
Why can't google have their own products'/services' links at the top of all search results?
For the same reason the courts broke up the stranglehold robber barons had in railroads and banking back in 1900... it's monopolistic and anticompetitive.
This time, much of the anticompetition will be totally invisible, since nobody but Google knows how they bias their search results. Do they collude with Microsoft Bing? Nobody knows but the e-robber barons.
But here there is other choices and Bing is two characters less so less friction. I think it is very bad policy to penalize someone that creates a better product.
I see no inherent advantage for Google over say MS. Google search is just a lot better and why no more Excited or Alta Vista, etc.
I use Google all day long. I start there for pretty much everything.
Looking for a product I start on Google and usually end up buying on Amazon.com. Amazon is Google's chief competitor yet it is one of the first couple links that come back.
Reason?
Because Amazon offers a great product and is popular and therefore high on the list returned.
Versus Yelp is awful and not high on the list. Google search is working how it should.
Yelp create a better product like Amazon and you get high on the list.
But how in the world did this story even get on 60 minutes? Does Yelp know someone at CBS?
Do a search for a product and Amazon is #1 or #2 result and chief competitor of Google and will not allow Google products to be sold by anyone on their market place.
This entire thing is ridiculous. Google is obviously not gaming results.
Yelp sucks so lower down. Make it better and be higher like Amazon.
> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
The problem is not Google. The problem is that the government is unable to get his head around an internet based monopoly. Google shouldnt be allowed to host more than 50% of searches by law.
In any other industry enjoying a monopoly position in search as google has enjoyed all these years would have reason enough to break it up into smaller pieces.
How does that work? How does Google “host” searches? 70% of searches go to Google because 70% of people type in “google”. The other 30% open IE/Edge and use Bing to search for google. Are you suggesting that when someone types in “google.com” it redirect them?
Microsoft could easily outbid Google to be the primary search engine on iOS and they could pay carriers to make Bing the primary search engines on the Android phones they sell.
I don't think Google still permits Android phones to select a different default search. They used to, several Verizon phones used to ship with Bing as default, before Google locked it down via the MADA. (And this is true even of Android phones Microsoft sells, if they have the Play Store, which Microsoft's own Android apps depend on, they must follow MADA terms.)
They could on iOS, but it's likely outbidding Google would make Bing unprofitable. (Currently, it turns a profit, and has for years.) Satya Nadella doesn't seem to be a big fan of keeping products or services that don't make money on their own, hence his willingness to chop off entire arms of Microsoft's prior strategy.
Neither Firefox nor iOS are “competitors” for Google. Google’s main business is advertising and collecting data. Both Chrome and Android are means to that end. Google wants to be wherever the users are, whether that’s on Android, iOS, Chrome, or Firefox.
For years, Google made more money on iOS than Android even after Androids market share eclipsed iOS’s market share.
What in the world are you talking about? MS owns Windows the dominate desktop platform. Huge advantage. Yet Google won because their browser and search is so much better.
We in Earth would we penalize someone for creating a superior product?
> In any other industry enjoying a monopoly position in search as google has enjoyed all these years would have reason enough to break it up into smaller pieces.
No, it wouldn't. Formation of monopolies is not illegal or grounds for breakup. Anticompetitively leveraging market power in one market to monopolize another market is illegal, and a variety of remedies, including breakup, may be available for that.
Firstly, It doesnt have to be illegal. Monopolies decrease choice for the customer and hamper innovation. That reason should be good enough and has been good enough in the case of telecom.
Secondly, if there is enough competition than why has Google enjoyed overwhelming market share for such a long time ? This doesnt happen in any other industry, not with any other company and definitely not in any industry as lucrative as search ads.
Thirdly, Search is critical infrastructure. Google is known to hire lobbyist to supress research unfavourable to it. How do we know that publishers do not self-censor content critical to Google lest they get bumped from search.
Yes, in the US, for government to break up a company, there must be something illegal done.
> This doesnt happen in any other industry, not with any other company and definitely not in any industry as lucrative as search ads.
Clearly, you are posting from an alternative universe where Microsoft, who has held overwhelmingly long-term dominance in at least two different markets significanlty longer than Google has existed (desktop OS and enterprise productivity suite.)
> Thirdly, Search is critical infrastructure.
If true, that would be a reason for it to be a public utility, not to break a Google. But if we can't even get a consensus that actual internet access should be a public utility, good luck making the case that search is.
> How do we know that publishers do not self-censor content critical to Google lest they get bumped from search.
In systems with due process, punishments aren't based on “how do we know X is not true”, but instead in “here is the evidence by which we know X is true”.
There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there?
They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad.
They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes.
Following up on the last idea They could have tried to auto cluster reviewers. (people who rated these 5 places as having good taste also liked ...)
the could have scanned menus so you could ask "where can I get a pepperoni pizza at 3am" instead of at best being able to look up "pizza" and figure the rest out yourself.
How about "where can I get a table for 10". How about partner with as many restaurants as possible so I can ask "who's still got a table for 4 for steak and win between 7 and 9pm tonight"
And maybe nothing would save them but I at least for me reviews make sense on Google maps. That yelp couldn't see their audience was going to dry up seems no different than newspaper classifieds and Craigslist. Their quality certainly isn't better so ATM there is zero reason to go there.