Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More | Hacker News Reader

Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More

techcrunch.com

67 pointsandrewpbrett33 comments

Doesn't Yelp offer astro-turfing for $$$? I hope that this practice doesn't fall under the umbrella of "don't be evil."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/

This seems like they paid people to write reviews, but I see no suggestion that they instructed paid reviewers to be biased. More content is better for everyone, as far as I can tell.

Another Register article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/yelp_pitch_revisited...) seems to be at most an accusation of unethical ad sales tactics, and it includes the CEO flat-out denying that they'd ever manipulated reviews for money.

Google's don't-be-evil policy bit the dust as soon as they bought DoubleClick, as far as I'm concerned. Their new policy can be accurately summed up as "be less evil than Microsoft", which has understandably given them a lot of headroom to expand.

Not a fair representation of Google's operations.

The accusation much more frequently levelled is that they extort business to pay to have negative reviews hidden:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-...

It's not lying -- the good reviews that remain come from real people -- but it's certainly misleading.

That article isn't exactly airtight in the evidence department.

I can vouch that negative reviews can be hidden, my friend wrote one and he sees "23 reviews" including his own, when he is logged in. Everyone else sees "22 reviews" and his is omitted.

Don't be evil is very difficult for a publicly held corporation. Their true mission, despite any noble intentions of their founders, is to increase value to the shareholders.

For me the first, "that sounds kinda evil" moment was the compliance with gov't censorship (and possibly private data sharing) in countries with poor human rights records. As someone stated, MS (and Yahoo) do the same, but it's still kind of sad.

If everyone lived by the "it's not THAT evil, 'cause everyone else does it" motto the world would be a vastly more horrific place.

Thinking about it... Everyone does live by that motto. Mostly.

I'm curious, do you think Google should operate in the United States? There are laws that could be used to force Google to say turn over your private data. Would not then the same argument apply?

On the other hand, the value of being able to use Google, despite its marginal risk, seems quite a good "exchange" for many people (that is, the usefulness of say search being weighed off against getting rounded up in say a war on child porn). I think there is a value judgement that is much more nuanced than what you are suggesting.

See, when our (US) government does it ...it's okay. It's just those other evil countries that are wrong when they demand user data from an Internet company.

Yes, there is certainly a value judgement here. This is why I was careful to use the term "poor human rights record". I'm sure there are many that think the US has a poor human rights record, and I know there is always room for improvement, but I'm certainly not afraid to use my Google account here.

For a more quantifiable ranking of countries, see:

http://www.carleton.ca/cifp/app/gdp_ranking.php

I really like Yelp and I think it's a great service, but I don't contribute because of the complete lack of data portability. Even their RSS feeds are heavily truncated. I'd contribute significantly if this changed. For instance, automatically posting my Yelp reviews to my blog would be a big incentive.

well, they have almost 22B dollars sitting in cash. from an investor's point of view, that is wasteful. Easy way to turn that cash into growing revenue streams is to purchase profitable companies. Though 500 mil is a bit steep to pay for yelp IMHO.

Yelp is sitting on a massive store of local business data. That's useful for search quality. Yelp is in the first three results for the majority of businesses in their database. That's useful for search monetization. They also have a direct sales force calling on local SMEs. That's useful for Google Apps. I could go on.

More valuable than all that is the fact that Yelp is the de-facto real-world review site. Its brand is powerful, about as powerful as YouTube's was when Google bought them.

A year or two ago, there were plenty of cities where Citysearch was more dominant than Yelp. I suspect this is still the case.

Apparently, they've been neck and neck for about a year: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/yelp.com+citysearch.com+met...

Maybe in the bay area. I'd never heard of yelp until I visited the area.

Also in NYC. Heck, it's even good for restaurant reviews when I visit home in NC.

I'm in Boston and I agree, Yelp is pretty much the de-facto real world review site.

I have to disagree. Unless you live in a city, your average person has never heard of Yelp. When Google bought YouTube it was a different story.

I concur. I live in kansas City and work on computers all day. I've heard of Yelp, but I've never used them or seen them pop up in search results for local business.

Yeah, my first reaction reading this headline was "who/what is Yelp?"

from an investor's point of view, [excess cash] is wasteful.

Noone was saying that 12 months ago.

This seems like a good marriage to me (or is it an adoption?). More and more on google, I see adsense results that are local in nature, and with more focus on android, this is a perfect addition to get more ad real estate that is location based.

I use a lot of iphone apps, but more often than not, when I have my wallet out, I use the Yelp app to purchase food or drink. As a user, I'd be much more reluctant to utilize an admob ad on an unrelated iphone app or game as opposed to clicking on an ad when I'm trying to find a good thai restaurant somewhere in the midwest.

This would actually perfectly compliment the new PlaceRank effort in which Google is sending out all of those QR stickers - Think foursquare for check in + Yelp userbase/content + locally targeted adwords, and throw in AdMob.

About the stickers: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google-foursqu...

you'll never, ever, ever hear me say this ever again: i thought scoble made some interesting points (when he talked about facebook acquiring yelp). http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-missed...

but what does google have to gain? extend google maps/local? aren't they already scraping reviews and ratings? screw the "don't be evil," what's in it for them...especially at $500M?

and as a random peanut gallery jab, it kills me how "past the term sheet stage" indicates an 80% probability. isn't anything past .01% "past the term sheet stage?"

Yelp has a lot of relationships with local businesses, something they are trying to grow with AdWords.

They also want the dataset. The current reviews google is crawling are lousy compared to Yelp's.

The main purpose of the buyout is to kill competition, IMO.

To max out profit Google may as well own the top 10 listings they display under major search terms (Knol) and long-tail local search (Yelp).

That should cover 50% of profitable searches yes?

Toddling monopoly?

i wonder if msft allows google to grab yelp too.

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