Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google | Hacker News Reader

Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

nytimes.com

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I find all this hand wringing over Google to be so tiring. Google is doing what is best for it's customers. Be that advertisers and/or searchers.

If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance.

Last I checked, nobody is forced to use google to search for things, nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome.

I'm not a laissez-faire capitalist by any means, but I don't see that Google has an unfair monopoly. They have achieved their dominance because their services are viewed as "best" by the majority of folks out there.

Nobody complains when Google suddenly starts delivering more customers to their web properties, only if traffic suddenly dies out.

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance.

That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape.

It is ok to be dominant in a product. You aren't, however, allowed to use the dominance in one product to gain you dominance in other products. Google has dominance in search, but using that to kill off competitors for their lesser-liked products isn't fair.

> They have achieved their dominance because their services are viewed as "best" by the majority of folks out there.

Their search service is viewed as "best" my most, but that doesn't mean their reviews service is. That's what's at issue. Being the best at one thing shouldn't allow you to stifle people that are better at another thing. That is certainly not best for consumers.

If Google were 20% of search traffic, they could do many things because there's no dominance at issue. Since Google is the vast majority of search traffic, they can effectively eliminate most competitors. Starting a reviews site? Your listings will fall below our own regardless of their merit. Starting a videos site, YouTube alternatives will always be shown first even if it's not what the user is looking for.

YouTube should be popular on its own merit, not based on Google using its search dominance to choke competitors. Google's reviews should be popular on their own merit, not based on Google using its search dominance to kill off Yelp.

I do want to clarify that I'm not saying that Google is guilty of doing this, but that when you get to a certain market dominance, you can kill off competitors that are better than you by starving them rather than by being better than them. It's important that third-parties can compete with Google's non-search services without having Google's search service unreasonably favor Google's non-search services.

It is ok to be dominant in a product. You aren't, however, allowed to use the dominance in one product to gain you dominance in other products.

Unfortunately there are countless counterexamples. It's an interesting ideal, but without court action it's toothless. And court action risks having a chilling effect on certain kinds of positive forces.

OP mentions it, but this was what bit Microsoft in United States v Microsoft (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C...)

>It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas

I think it's a stretch to say that searching for HVAC business listings and searching for HVAC business reviews are really different markets. If google had an HVAC subsidiary and they suppressed all search results and ads for competing HVAC companies, that would be abusing their dominant position in the search market to create dominance in another market. But is it really monopolistic behaviour to use their web search dominance to succeed in a slightly more specific sector of the web search market? You can use google to find reviews of products and services. They advertise alongside those search results. That is their core business. Yelp is a straight-up competitor. "Google is better than us in the market we compete in" isn't a valid anti-trust complaint.

I think the point here is that Google is not returning the best results but pushing it's own other services on top of the list even if in this case other review services are better.

And even when the searcher is VERY specific that they want Yelp...it's right in the query.

..why didn't they go to yelp then?

To a large percentage of Internet users, entering something into the Google search bar IS how they go places. (The address bar is a very strange mystery to plenty of people.) That's a big part of why Google is not permitted to act the way they are. They have become more or less the front door to the Internet, and hence, cannot unfairly prioritize their own products over others'.

A big part of why tech users don't understand why Google is being subject to antitrust action is that a lot of people in the tech industry literally have no idea how everyone else uses their computers. Like not understanding that people tend to go to Yelp by Googling "yelp" and clicking the first link. (Which is sadly, usually a malicious Google Ad imitating Yelp, but I digress.)

This behaviour is encouraged by Chrome. The address bar prefers to suggest searches over the user's own history, ensuring that even a website they visit every other day will likely trigger a Google search. Firefox, on the other hand, has a strong bias towards history, allowing the user to go straight to their destination.

Yes I've noticed that this has become a worse experience over time. I used to be able to find previously visited sites easily but now I can't because suggestions take precedence over even exact substring matches of urls.

And in chrome the address bar is hijacked to be a Google search

Simple setting to change the search engine.

Should I interpret your comment as helpful ("btw, you can fix that in the settings!") or annoying disregard for the powerful difference between opt-in and opt-out ("there's nothing wrong with bad defaults as long as the option exists to change them!")?

It's displaying ads above the search results. That's what google does. It's their whole business. It's not pushing their own review services over yelp, it's advertising alongside search results.

What about when they put a Chrome ad even if you are not searching for replacing your browser? So the main point with the EU antitrust is not about yelp but about Google putting it's own stuff on top , not about the ads.

This one should stand out to most people so it's no surprise to me that EU took note as well.

That's likely the crux of the complaint. It's not alongside, it's on top of...and "over" Yelp.

And the query specifically included the word Yelp.

No, when Google just lists local businesses and puts them on a map, that's NOT ads. Businesses get listed at no charge.

They didn't google for 'reviews', they literally googled for 'yelp'

"Yelp" is generic for "customer reviews"!

... half serious?

I couldn't agree more. Look at internet speed tests. I used the ookla speed test because it was the first result until one day Google had created its own, built right into the search results page. I don't know which product is better, but it's easy to see ookla getting starved out by this regardless of product merit.

Do you have any views on Facebook and their product line?

It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas.

As far as I know it's only illegal when there is harm to consumers. Antitrust laws are meant to protect consumers, not competitors.

Consumers and competitor benefit are effectively intertwined. Consumers need healthy competitors to avoid being subject to monopolies, so antitrust laws protect competitors to benefit consumers.

Can you provide a specific issue?

If I put a competitor (eg. yelp, angie[slist], etc) into my search query, I get only results for those competitors. Leave the qualifying term out, and I get a SERP of all non-Google review sites. But again, I enter "yelp pizza" and get all Yelp results. Hell, I enter "pizza reviews" and get Yelp as the top 3 links of my SERP.

If I search for "9000 shimano derailleur" on Google, the top infobox link is "Shop for 9000 shimano derailleur on Google".

This links to the Google comparison shopping site, which Google receives affiliate income for. The Google comparison shopping site is ok, but no better than many others.

I generally like the work Google does, but I think that there are some questions around using their dominant position in organic web search to move into a new market. To be clear, I'm not absolutely opposed to this, but I can see problems.

> nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome

Unlike iOS you can install different browsers on Android directly from the Play Store. These can actually be different browsers with their own rendering engines not just alternative UIs on top of Chrome. Firefox on Android for example uses the actual Firefox rendering engine, not Chrome.

You can, but by default you get Chrome, which is about the same thing people were fighting Microsoft over in the Netscape-IE days, but this time on Android.

one more thing to mention about that default chrome on android: you cannot install ad-blocker there.

you may install firefox and still will have a lot of time links opened in built-in chrome, on android

The difference being that Apple has a huge percentage of the market share and Android isn't the only game in town.

"Huge"? In the EU, where the current investigations are going, Apple is barely a blip on the radar. Windows Mobile has had better traction in some parts of Europe than the iPhone.

Android has over an 85% global market share. And for OEMs, there is NO other game in town, since iOS isn't licensable.

Apple only has a significant share in a few geographies, for the most part the world has turned to Android already.

That case created a misconception that refuses to die... There's nothing inherently illegal about having a default app or product. There's also nothing inherently illegal about having a popular app or product.

The reason Microsoft got in trouble is because it was not only found that they had a monopoly in a particular market, but that they obtained some of that market share illegally through shady contracts effectively forbidding OEMs from offering alternative OSes, etc... They were then found to have used that illegally obtained monopoly to take over a completely different market in part by bundling IE with Windows and punishing OEMs who sought to including alternate browsers and completely disallowing the removal of IE.

I see Firefox and Chrome and several other browsers in the iOS AppStore.

But they rely on the browser engine Apple ships.

So, they can still have their own search engine configuration.

Those are just UI shells that will use the same built-in rendering engine.

They are just themes of safari.

> Google is doing what is best for it's customers.

But is it? Because right now I basically can't stop using Google services at this point because they pushed out many others from the market. I would however greatly prefer some competition in the field.

Which Google services no longer have competition?

Google Search for a start. Youtube is effectively standing alone in the space. Google Maps is completely dominating the space (in particular there is nothing that replaces the Earth product or the parts of Earth in maps).

Gmail is taking over the world over here. Most local mail solutions are irrelevant at this point and the only real alternative to gmail even intentionally is outlook now.

Chrome effectively took out the rest of the bunch as well, at least on desktop and Android.

Lastly Google's ad business is something nobody can avoid.

Bing, Vimeo, Here, Yahoo Mail, Firefox

Some ad blockers can block Google AdSense.

Do you run a website where those are significant traffic? It's been a long time since not-Google search has been more than a rounding error in my experience, with the exception of Yandex for Russia and Baidu for China if you have content for those audiences.

Vimeo and Firefox are trying but the trajectory has not been good.

The question was about alternatives to Google services (which do exist in almost every category), not about the share of traffic that websites receive from various search engines. If websites want to avoid being overly dependent on Google then they're going to have to get creative and figure out ways to drive traffic other than search.

Your last sentence is the point: it doesn't matter if there are alternatives which are either unused and so far the only company which has figured out how to out-drive Google is Facebook, hardly more responsive to the rest of the web's needs.

That was the problem: in search, Google effectively has no competition. The fact that there are other areas like social networking doesn't change the fact that if you're a website operator you have to work well with Google even if you can write off everyone else.

Right, but unless you are accusing Google of foul play, their market dominance is just evidence of the superior consumer value they provide. In other words, they are doing what is best for its customers.

The question of this thread is: did Google unfairly push out their competition. If you can't argue that, then this is just pointless Google hand wringing.

This is actually untrue. It's not illegal to become a monopoly. It's illegal to be anticompetitive once you have that market dominance.

Google may have achieved it's dominance legally, however, it's conduct since then is illegal.

I know it's not illegal to be a monopoly, that's actually my point. I was responding to the_mitsuhiko's complaints of Google monopoly in certain areas, to which I argue that Google's monopoly status isn't inherently a problem.

> their market dominance is just evidence of the superior consumer value they provide.

I don't think that's true.

They leveraged their search engine dominance to push Chrome on people with banners stating that the user experience would be better on Chrome.

They bundled the Chrome installer with a load of other app installers and users would immediately find themselves with a new, default browser, because Google knew most users never explore advanced installer options to discover they needed to opt-out.

Google maps is far worse than OSM and HereMaps in my opinion, but it is far more pervasive because it is the go-to mapping service when users perform a search.

Fastmail is actually an amazing alternative over Gmail. Have been using it for half a year now and will never go back. I use my own domain with it, so even if Fastmail disappears, I am still in control.

You are... until gmail decides not to accept mail from your mailserver.

I don't run my own mailserver, as I said, I use Fastmail with my own domain. Two very different things.

> Google Search for a start.

DuckDuckGo isnt one?

Looking at what is best for consumers is missing the point. The point is that when companies use leverage in one market to help themselves or hurt competitors unfairly in other markets it stifles competition.

It's hard to be a web browser company when it comes bundled with the OS. Do you really want a world where you choose Apple, Google, or Amazon once for everything everywhere and that is the only choice you get? Or do you want Unix philosophy for businesses and mix and match however you feel?

Isn't stifling competition only bad if it harms consumers? I don't understand how what's best for consumers isn't the point.

As long as there is credible competition, market forces work. When Google (or MS, or Amazon, or...) successfully destroy all of their competition, that's when consumers suffer, and that's when it's too late for regulators to effectively solve the problem. See the cable/telco duopolies for an example of that problem in action.

So, sure. The fight to destroy all competitors is good for consumers while it lasts. Once it's over and there's a monopoly or cartel (as in the case of last-mile internet), the consumer is at the mercy of the monopolist. History indicates the monopolist will not be benevolent.

History also indicates the monopolist will leverage their increased power to manipulate the legal environment to prevent new competitors from springing up. In addition to the telcos, the fossil fuel industry is an example of that lately; despite renewables being cheaper and creating more jobs, more than half of our elected officials in the US are working hard to ensure another decade of fossil fuel energy dominance.

I should have said looking at whether it is harming consumers now isn't the point. It's how it harms consumers over time. The chilling effect on innovation, the monoculture/fragility, the lock-in will hurt consumers in the long run.

People can compete with Google on quality of reviews. This is attempt to make Google less useful.

I think the position the powers that take is that competition is intrinsically consumer beneficial, with the inverse assumption that anything that harms competition harms consumers.

These anti-trust laws were originally created to whack railroad companies, which had huge capital investments and "natural monopolies".

Google does have some investment in its data centers, but people never make the explicit argument that the $11 billion/year in data centers is what causes them to be a monopoly. They make the much more abstract "market dominance" argument that I don't buy.

The only thing that I'd consider a monopoly in the same spirit would be the ISPs. It's stupid to dig up the streets twice just for "competition", so there's a natural monopoly. And it'd probably cost untold billions to rebuild it.

I find it amusing how their argument is similar to the MS' antitrust argument in 90s.

Microsoft: "An OS should include everything. Third party apps aren't needed. It's only good for consumers."

Google: "A search engine should include everything. Third party websites aren't needed. It's only good for consumers."

More interesting is the HN (and elsewhere) crowd that never relents on Google apologetics, yet presumably would be (and among those older, were) among the Microsoft critics.

People's allegiances and opinions often settle in when they're younger, and they will stick to those brand loyalties for decades into the future. A lot of us grew up (or got into tech) during the Microsoft lawsuit days, which set in that view, and when Google came around, they were a breath of fresh air.

It's really hard for people to realize that times have changed and the tables have turned.

You're describing me and it pretty much comes down to trust. I trust Google a lot more than I ever trusted Microsoft back when they were the bully.

Why do you trust Google a lot more? What did they do to deserve your trust?

They gave things away for free.

Microsoft gave tons of Windows 10 licenses for free. Does that mean you can trust them?

For me it's not that Google is more trustworthy, but that their influence and abuse of monopoly position doesn't affect me as much. As a developer I'm well aware of my options for search and operating systems.

I can choose not to use an Android phone. I can choose not to use Google search, block Google domains in my hosts file, etc. While the alternatives are probably not as pleasing or convenient, I can definitely get by without Google.

I can also get by without Microsoft. I've used Linux almost exclusively for 15 years now. But choosing to stick on Linux has been made harder with Microsoft's monopoly. It's easier now but I can remember when it was very difficult to find good hardware to run Linux and not have to pay a premium or pay for a Windows license even if you never wanted Windows (and definitely didn't want to pay out of principle).

As far as I know, Google's dominance on search doesn't affect my experience when I use other services. I haven't seen a "Halloween documents" event out of Google's camp.

Which seems foolish. Microsoft just dictated the format your save file was in. Google ensures that by default most users never have their own data to load into another product at all. You seem to trust them because they have their hands around your throat rather than just your wrist.

Google Takeout let's you grab your data from their systems, easy. Import is another story

> Which seems foolish

I'm yet to see any malicious actions by Google that comes close to the Halloween Documents or the licensing shenanigans. I don't know if you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but at it's peak, Microsoft was capital-E Evil (or ruthless if you're against moralizing): comparing Microsoft then to Google today seems foolish to me.

Edit: I naively think Google works with the principle that "What's good for the web is good for Google" and works to improve the web (and to my benefit). 90's Microsoft principle was "What's good for Microsoft is good for Microsoft. Destroy anyone who tries to mess with that"

> Microsoft: "An OS should include everything. Third party apps aren't needed. It's only good for consumers."

What? MS was all about third party apps and encouraged the vendor lock in they provided. Windows was absolutely spartan compared to what you'd get with a linux distro at the time.

I know the included certain apps that were contentious, like a browser, but Balmer wasn't kidding when he made that "dvelopers, developers, developers" speech.

For me Google is the best search on technical issues and research. When it comes down to touchy political and social issues, Bing and DuckDuckGo beat Google every time. In fact I don't even use Google to look up things I see in the news. It is always skewed. I completely avoid Google News.

Honest question, how is it skewed? Not a fan of google news myself for other reasons but never felt they forced a PoV.

They filter and service your results based on what they think you want to see.

Filter bubbling.

> Google is doing what is best for it's customers

except it has been shown that the organic search results rank Yelp listings higher than Google's Local listings thus they are, in fact, displaying worse results at the top. Unless you believe Google's search product sucks I think this proves they aren't doing what's best for customers at all, they are doing what's best for them.

Keep in mind they are trying to develop Google Maps into a social review platform where you can write reviews, order delivery, etc. that seems similar to Yelp. Is it not clear they are using their Search monopoly to get more content on their own, currently worse, local reviews platform to have it become more dominant in the long run?

Except if you look at the screenshot in Stoppelman's tweet, it's clear that Google's Local listings are displayed as advertisements. The Local section is unambiguously tagged as "Sponsored". Yelp and Local rankings aren't comparable.

Unless you think Google shouldn't be allowed to run their own advertising systems?

I like Google too. And I like the search engine returning products if it thinks they are relevant. But the issue behind EU commission was that they found Google purposely lower the ranks of relevant competitor's results nearly off the front page without merit.

The typical argument is that Google can do that because it is their search agent. But they did not express it explicitly in their terms of service.

It's not about whether a monopoly is fair or "unfair", it's about whether it provides power that they can abuse and is thus worse for the public interest.

Google got their monopoly fairly enough, maintain it through a mix of fair and questionable practices, and definitely uses their monopoly now in ways that are anti-competitive.

Whoah. Hold on. The problem is not with Google offering a Review service for HVAC companies. If the Google reviews are more comprehensive and valuable than Yelp- by all means have them show up in the organic listings- for that matter even use up your own budget to take up the sponsored space. But don't pretend that you've now got a new feature as part of search (taking up the sponsored box as a legal maneuver) that offers a similar service like Yelp and that it is part of your Google Search service. That is PURE EVIL.

The problem is that Google does what customers want selectively. For example, I don't think I want my search results to be as dominated by ads as they are today.

Once the competition is beaten, they may change their priorities from giving the customer and the partners what they want, to doing what is best for Google. Compare youtube of five years ago to now. There are many more ads and many more restrictions on how partners can place ads. If youtube had started with those rules and that much advertising I think it would have been less successful.

There is a pattern for all internet companies where they say to users and partners: look how great our platform is. And then when they achieve dominance they change the rules. The best protection is competition.

> I don't see that Google has an unfair monopoly.

really? isn't the use of their search engine to squelch competition in local reviews support that they are a monopoly?

"Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time."

That sums it up for Yelp and many others, myself included. Combine that reality with the black box that Google is, in many ways, and you have an inaccessible behemoth who's decisions decide the fate of many.

Googles combination of Search, Browser, and Advertising dominance gives it a unique position of power. Then there are secondary markets like Android that just buttress their position.

I see the fight raging about net neutrality and keep thinking that Google neutrality is just as important. It affects people in even more meaningful ways, determining where they go and what they see on the Internet.

Just like it was impossible to start a car company after say 1920 due to the established players, it has become impossible to start and run a large consumer internet company where the primary function is information retrieval/search like in Yelp. If Google maps did not exist (with "Local Guides" now), Yelp's market cap could have been 5x of what it is. They were lucky that they started in 2004 when Google bombing was still possible: had they started more recently, they would not have gotten even the market cap they have now: high barrier to entry, no cheap distribution channels.

I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic? Several car companies operating today were founded after 1920.

Who owns them now?

You are right it would be more precise to say after 1948. There is only one company in the 10 biggest companies that got founded after 48.

I agree. As a web publisher who depends on advertising for revenue and Google for traffic, things are getting more and more difficult. Google providing answers in the search box robs legitimate publishers of traffic. But the industry is so fragmented that a concerted legal action against Google is not possible.

Since this is HN, I expect people are going to start chanting "Die you ad supported publishers or find a new business model. We love Google because it's great for the users to read the answer on Google and not have to visit your ad laden site". I understand this sentiment but don't agree with it. Users love anything that's free. That does not mean Google can steal it and give it to them.

The implicit contract between publishers and Google is that publishers let Google crawl and index their content. In return, Google includes the publisher in their search results so users can find the information they are looking for and publishers get traffic. Outright copying of this information is stealing because it robs publishers of their revenue stream.

OK, so now that implicit contract changed and says Google can show that information above the organic search results. Given this, publishers do have a choice of blocking Google in their robots.txt.

this is an implicit agreement (not explicit). the agreement changed. publishers still have a chance to respond... dont like it? block google! (its just 1 line in robots.txt) go rely on word of mouth, bing, ads and emailing to get traffic!

dont want to do that? oh i see... well that means you voluntarily agree to the agreement and have no right to complain.

> you voluntarily agree to the agreement and have no right to complain

See, that sounds exactly like the kind of thing a standover merchant would say: feel free not to pay the protection fees, sure would be a shame if something would happen to your organic search traffic…

Blocking Google via robots.txt isn't an option because Google has a monopoly. You're amputating the whole leg because of an infected toe. Instead of free samples at Costco you're giving away entire boxes and users love you for it because it's free. It's the producer who loses the revenue.

At what point do you draw the line? Is it OK if Google steals 1 line? How about a whole list of steps for how to do something? How about when Google takes an image from your page and puts it in its hero search result "answer box" but with a link to another site?

As a publisher, I feel the right solution is that the publisher decides the title and meta description -- which are the 2 things Google needs to show in their SERPs. If my title and description snippet are clickbaity or not good enough, other publishers can win. That's fine because publishers are competing on a level playing field.

> it's great for the users to read the answer on Google

Do you disagree with that part? If a user reads a couple of sentences and decides they won't gain anything more by reading your page, are they wrong?

Web publishers have gotten lazy. Instead of becoming more dependant on Google and then complaining about being marginalized they should put more effort into marketing directly to their target audience and finding non-advertising revenue models.

Even when publishers have a good brand, it doesn't change user behavior. How often do users directly go to Wikipedia to look something up? Google search is integrated into Chrome, Android, Google Home. Google is a monopoly.

Yes, publishers should find non-advertising revenue models. Yes, they should find non-Google sources of traffic. But that's blaming the victim. The fact is that Google has started stealing more and more content from large and small publishers in order to keep the user from leaving Google. And it's not OK for a monopoly to do that.

Content isn't stolen when it's given voluntarily. Websites can block the Google crawler, or remove their pages from the search index.

As has been pointed out, so many users have gotten in the habit of using an omni-box to go to all URLs via a search. Staying its a choice to block Google is a false choice as that would mean death. The analogies are spot on. Google is in a position of power due to search dominance and content creators have very little unless every content creator decided to all drop off together. This is unlikely.

> "Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time."

Ah the irony. Yelp is the same website that bullied small businesses to pay for positive reviews[1].

[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bus...

"Ah the irony. Yelp is the same website that bullied small businesses to pay for positive reviews"

No, Yelp is accused of this. Nobody has ever shown it to be true.

(I can also tell you, as someone who worked there, that it definitely is not true, but you don't have to take my word for it. You just have to not confuse accusations with facts.)

I can see both being true. Assuming the sales staff are on commission, there's a strong possibility some asshattery happened.

Perhaps you didn't run into any unethical sales staff.

I ran into plenty of idiots in sales. I don't assume anything about what salespeople say...but I know for a fact that salespeople at Yelp have no ability to affect reviews.

Anyone has the ability to affect reviews to some degree. And anyone can imply they have more control.

"Anyone has the ability to affect reviews to some degree."

No, they don't. Except in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.

I came here looking for claims like these. It always has baffled me the number of first hand accounts of Yelp salesperson shenanigans with no documented examples.

What do you think is the root of the accusations? Do yelp salespeople promise things they can't deliver?

I know of one cafe owner that had legitimate 5 star reviews removed. They were returned after the bad press.

there are a lot of businesses on yelp. some of them are bound to suck. blaming somebody else is the easiest option and yelp is the easiest target.

I was thinking more about the reports that Yelp salespeople suggest that they can clean up bad reviews.

Trustpilot is the new kid on the block for the review shakedown, blackmail as a service provider

As someone who also worked there, the official company line internally is a suspiciously specific denial that does not actually deny the main accusations I had heard previously. I consider it just as plausible that Yelp squelches negative reviews when paid as I did before.

It would help if Yelp allowed new, emerging search engines (potential google competitors) to crawl their site. But their robots.txt only allows Google, Bing and a few others to crawl them (https://yelp.com/robots.txt)

allow all crawlers and I would have at least a little sympathy for Yelp.

Presumably they want a legal defense against scrapers.

There are probably food delivery and restaurant reservation startups complaining that Yelp has a monopoly position on restaurant search.

> Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time

The same basic thing could be said for most of Yelp's customers. Many would prefer that Yelp not exist or not index them but are forced to buy expensive plans with Yelp to have some measure of control over their public profile. It's basically a modern-day version of the protection rackets employed by organized crime. As much as I think Google has outsized power and does need to be reined in in certain circumstances, I have very little sympathy for Yelp being subjected to the same sort of undesirable influence from a larger, more powerful company that they exert on much smaller companies.

> but are forced to buy expensive plans with Yelp to have some measure of control over their public profile

what evidence do you have to suggest that (a) business owners are forced to buy plans from Yelp (b) there's a strong correlation between business owners who don't pay Yelp and are not successful? I'm pretty sure these have been debunked[1] but if you have data I'd like to see it.

in spite of this, even if you personally believe Yelp has sketchy business practices, is unethical, etc. it does not follow that what Google is doing is OK. There are actually laws that attempt to stop what Google is doing but as far as I know, Yelp's not breaking any laws.

[1] http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoum...

Data, no. But I worked at a company that built a product for small business marketing/reputation. So I and my colleagues there spoke to hundreds of different small businesses and it was a recurring theme. My team actually worked on an integration with Yelp, so we had discussions with customers specifically on that topic. At one point, we asked our success team (a team that called customers once per month to proactively help with issues they might be having) to look for customers who were also happy Yelp customers as potential beta testers of our integration. In their first two weeks of calls, they didn't find any happy Yelp customers among the ~18,000 of our customers they called. They eventually found two among the other half of our customer base, but seeing that it was literally 2 out of thousands led me to my point of view.

Of course, it doesn't absolve Google of their tactics. I only mentioned it because it seems like a pot-kettle situation to me. My company actually had its own problems with Google. At one point, Google switched from displaying reviews that we collected and syndicated to them on search results to hiding them behind a "X more reviews on ..." link. I believe it was when Google started collecting their own reviews, but it was before my time there. It almost killed the company and made our offering significantly less valuable.

The same could be said of Yelp:

"Mr. Restaurant Owner feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small restaurants, he lives in a world where one company, Yelp, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time."

Google's power in the consumer market is merely commensurate to the market value they create, just like Yelp.

I found that Yelp's reviews very unreliable. My business owner friends told me that they are constantly harassed by yelp's sales representatives to buy the right to "clean up" their reviews. I don't see how yelp can continue trash their brand like this and blaming Google for their low performance.

Cleaning up reviews is actually not a Yelp feature. Paid or unpaid.

It seems to be a sales tactic though.

False. Squelching reviews that are "not relevant" or otherwise flagged, making them not show up unless the list of reviews is expanded to include the described-as-low-quality reviews, and IIRC not being included in the star-rating calculation, is SOP at Yelp.

It's done algorithmically by default, but there are people whose job it is to track places where the algorithms have gone wrong, and while ostensibly their latitude for independent decision is narrow it's actually pretty broad. Also that set of decisions is kept in a separate DB most programmers can't view or interact with, but which the customer support team could easily point the flaggers to.

Source: Worked there briefly.

Their complaint is still just.

> I found that Yelp's reviews very unreliable.

followed by hearsay about your friends who told you about what a Yelp sales rep said.

How is this an argument for Google's business practices?

If these businesses are "constantly harassed" why has there never been published a recording of these harassing calls? There are 38 states in which either party can record a call without the consent of the other party.

There's a bar nearby that has a "People Hate Us On Yelp!" sticker. I ran into the owner there one day and I asked him about it and he claimed that he immediately got it after the third or fourth call from the Yelp sales reps about cleaning up their reviews.

From then on, he started telling people to give bad reviews of the bar. It's not like it matters, it's a very popular bar.

Summary: a scummy company like Yelp pays to influence regulators in order to force one of their competitors to change their product to be less consumer friendly and to better feature Yelp.

2 cents here:

My background: I co-founded the largest online dating site in the Netherlands (sold to Match) as well as the largest housing platform (15 years before Airbnb :-). We leveraged the rise of Google to our advantage and the brands are still #1 in the Netherlands.

===

Aside: Google raised the bar for the Internet. Heck, for the world. I think their offering is orders of magnitude better than the Excite, Lycos and AltaVista days, and the no-nonsense UI allows for a purer form if of information consumption.

A day without Facebook is a productive day. A day without Google is a day lost.

Where Google is like water to the Internet, Facebook is like a sugary softdrink. Enticing, but unhealthy with no nutritional content.

===

Google is the de-facto search on the Internet. This is reflected in their valuation, as well as the fact that to "google" something is now a verb written in lowercase.

As a result, Google is the lens through which the world finds its information.

Being in this position also implies that Google should be regulated to block advertisers (and Google) from using third party trademarks as keywords:

It has irked me for many years that Google can sell advertising to companies for keywords that are trademarks this advertiser does not own. E.g. Adidas showing up when searching for Nike. It's nothing short of extortion that I would be forced to bid up bidding on _my own trademark_.

Here is Google's policy: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en

It seems a trivial matter to me to query the USPTO and the EU database to make sure that any AdWords show up below the organic search results for the valid trademark owner (as verified inside AdWords).

In this case, Yelp is a trademark, and Google's own product should show up _below_ Yelp's trademark. Otherwise, I don't see how this could be interpreted other than abuse of market monopoly.

As a regular netizen I just don't trust Yelp. I'll use any other reputation service before them.

Interestingly, the other firms cited in the article as taking up the Google fight are Microsoft and Oracle, which both have had their antitrust issues.

This definitely looks like a case of "well, we got in trouble for this, so they should get their come-upings too!".

It's always worth noting that today's underdog could be tomorrow's monopolist. When any of these companies get on top, they'll do anything to stay that way.

So like, today I would consider Microsoft an ally against the current monopoly party, but I have no doubt that Microsoft would return to their old ways if they were on top again.

It doesn't get much more despicable than Yelp. They've been threatening and extorting small businesses for years. There's an upcoming documentary film that exposes them for who they truly are.

>Billion Dollar Bully is an investigative documentary that examines allegations against Yelp regarding extortion, review manipulation, and review fabrication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs

Sure, but a despicable company may still have legitimate complaints about other companies.

Unrelated but related, what is it like to work at Yelp?

I was recently contacted by them for a position but it didn't inspire confidence. The mention of a "shoestring operation" in this article is making me believe I made the right choice.

It depends on position. They treat CSRs like absolute shit -- see Talia Jane. Given a choice, I'd prefer not to work for companies that treat any employee like that.

Curious, but is there any company that treats CSR's really well and have a 85%+ employee satisfaction?

I've worked at a lot of great companies, and the CSR groups are always unhappy and have miserable employee satisfaction ratings. I also started my career in customer service, so I've seen good and bad firsthand.

I believe Zappos treats its CSRs fairly well, considering they are considered the backbone of the company.

However, this is secondhand, gleaned from several books and articles I've read.

I've read her article. (https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73d...)

It really has nothing substantive to say except "I'm struggling, pay me more."

She even points to several facts in her article.

"She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage."

"But boy did I not anticipate a decade and a half ago that a car and a credit card and an apartment would all be symbols of stress, not success."

If you hate the job that badly or feel like you're not being renumerated properly, you have options open. I'm assuming she doesn't have a house, because of the mention of her apartment.

Yelp is not holding a gun to your head. Neither are they responsible for paying you what you think is necessary for a comfortable life.

If you want to support a company that pays employees $12.50/hour in sf, that's your choice. However, I don't support that, and the thing about employment at will is we can use how a potential employer treats employees to evaluate the employer.

> Neither are they responsible for paying you what you think is necessary for a comfortable life.

However, kindly don't misrepresent the contents of Talia's article and shift the goalposts from "comfortable life" to "remain housed and eat (and even see a doctor when necessary)." Because she's asking for the bare minimums, not a comfortable life.

> However, I don't support that

No company cares because that's not how it works. Companies pay what the job is worth, then increase as needed if talent isn't available. Minimum wage work that anyone can do is not worth anything beyond that wage, regardless of where someone lives.

> she's asking for the bare minimums

No she's not. The job is worth a certain amount and deciding to accept and live with that is up to you. She was completely irresponsible by moving to an expensive area, getting a min. wage job and living beyond her means. 100% her fault. Then writing a strange article playing victim and calling out the CEO while including links to donate to her paypal account is about as ridiculous as it gets.

> However, kindly don't misrepresent the contents of Talia's article and shift the goalposts

I have not misrepresented anything. Please point me to an instance in my comment where I have.

In addition, I'm not shifting the goalposts. She said herself that she had a car, an apartment, residence in the US, credit cards, and a college degree, and she wants more. I believe she already has the bare minimums, as she would be considered incredibly wealthy by about 80% of the world.

> Because she's asking for the bare minimums, not a comfortable life.

As I pointed out earlier, she wants a comfortable life. More importantly, in her article, she has not pointed out any negotiations she's done with her employer to ask for a raise. She is simply demanding more money, for no good reason whatsover. If you cannot demonstrate and communicate the value you're adding to the company as well as your willingness to leave, why would the company give you more money?

Also, this article seems like emotional blackmail that plays into the current zeitgeist of "tech is bad, you should give more money away". If she gave compelling value add arguments, she'd definitely get paid more. Right now she's only presenting her wants and needs - the company doesn't care.

First comment on your first comments page I agree with.

That was only in reference to their lobbying "office" in washington DC (no formal office, just a seat in a coworking place).

Isn't Yelp the company that hosts reviews of local businesses while at the same time getting paid for advertising by those businesses?

Same with Google right?

They lowball you (or rather, their stock performance is garbage and they won't adjust RSUs to account for that).

Their SF headquarters is a standard silicon valley playground. I'm not sure why the author tried to differentiate Yelp from regular SF/Silicon Valley companies by only mentioning its drab satellite office

As an engineer, it's actually a pretty great employer. I enjoy working there and there's lots of folks who've been there for many years.

I worked there as a software engineer for six years, first in SF, then remotely in Oregon. I loved it. The people are brilliant and friendly, the codebase and tooling are top-notch. If you're a programmer, it's a great place to work.

Not good. The codebase is a terrible monolith using frameworks long-dead everywhere else, there's poor coordination.

What I find troubling about Yelp's arguments and the antitrust situation is that these parties are basically telling a company what its website must look like and have.

They are saying that a website must conform to their idea of a search page which contains only plain text search results.

I'm under the impression that only EU slaps antitrust charges lately.

Which is a shame. I doubt any real antitrust cases will be brought here in the US for the next 4 years.

Honestly, I'd say longer than that. The Democrats have very little impetus to do them either, given their corporate funding record.

It's been about 30 years since the Democrats gave up on the working classes to cater to "Cause of the Week", "Big Media", and associated areas. Even Obama, with the ACA, set it up that we're required to pay for-profit companies for insurance. He even had a super-majority to enable Medicare for All... but didn't.

Republicans claim they're for the "Common Working Man", but time and again we see policies that ascribe to 'Socialism for the Rich, and Capitalism for the Poor'. And that's not discussing Trump, who has been criticized by both US parties for his actions. (I'm focusing on R-Congress and state governors.)

Something's got to give, and I don't see this going well at all. The fact that regulators and congress refuse to do anything is just a symptom.

Medicare doesn't cut out the private insurance companies either. If you have 'Medicare Advantage', the Feds are subsidizing your private insurance premium. If you have regular Medicare, the Feds are paying one of a handful of private insurance companies to manage your account. It has been this way for quite some time now.

Apparently only if you buy an elephant for one of their regulators.

It seems political. The EU is taking on a lot of US companies with antitrust complaints but few EU companies.

This is an excellent way to try and distract from the actual issues the EU has charged them with, and try to delegitimize the claims of one of the largest governments in the world because you like the company they're going after this week.

The EU has filed plenty of antitrust complaints against EU companies, but the reality is, particularly in the tech field, US monopolists are dominating. The fact that there are more US companies breaking the law, does not mean the EU filing more cases against US companies is political.

That's a US-centric viewpoint, and the same could be said about the US and its attitude towards for example, European banks.

It's a pointless argument and only serves to distract from the actual issues relating to Google's operation.

The problem is that there's Google the search engine and Google the answer engine. They should split off the answer engine part into something completely new, based on Google search results but with the decoration they like to add and they think is the reason people love to use Google. Including integration into your mail, private thoughts, everything. Give that to the people who love it. Integrate it with Android and some kind of voice device in your living room. Experience this and that.

Google.com should go back to a search box, two buttons, three ads and ten results per page. No content mix, just pure results. Honest search, only external results. No abuse of monopoly.

The thing with Yelp is that the negative reviews usually have a grain a truth to them.

I think they should pivot into an Internet complaints department.

I wish this were any company other than Yelp pushing things.

Yelp is sufficiently slimy in and unto themselves that it hurts their case.

yelp and tripadvisor basically destroyed the usage of "site:.XX" on google. Now every time I want to look for information on a specific country, I have to skip the first 2-4 results because they are almost "spam"

Indeed, Google is too big and has a massive effect on the Internet across the whole world. A single capricious decision made by Google/Alphabet can cause dozens of businesses to shutter or fail. And that is a big problem, especially if we care about upstarts and new companies.

However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".

The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.

Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.

(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )

You're absolutely right. Yelp adds no value the dozens of other review apps don't, they simply succed because they extort and blackmail small businesses. I refuse to install their app and the quicker they die the better.

> they extort and blackmail small businesses

do you have any evidence of this?

Hundreds of first hand accounts

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2segh5/yelp_accused_o...

Plus everything in Billion Dollar Bully.

It's fact at this point.

> have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies

do you have any evidence of this?

http://nypost.com/2014/10/13/restaurant-fights-yelps-alleged...

Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings, because good ratings are hidden since they didn't pay extortion.

-----------------------------

https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f/yelp_is_blackma...

Yelp "makes 4-5 star reviews go away" when restaurant refuses to pay extortion.

-----------------------------

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-yelps-blackmail-lawsuit-c...

Stoppelman says that businesses want to control their reputation, and Yelp's position is to charge for that. Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion? Sure seems so.

-----------------------------

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2014/09/03/court-sa...

The courts said that "Pay to Play" isn't strictly extortion. And claims that Yelp themselves wrote bad reviews were unsubstantiated (no proof, server logs can be a 'tricksy' thing....).

-----------------------------

https://www.cnet.com/news/to-mock-yelp-restaurant-asks-custo...

This has gotten bad enough, that businesses are telling customers to seed YELP with good "Bad reviews".

-----------------------------

Seriously, when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need? There seems to be a misdirection by blaming 3rd party customers, but seriously. They're using blackmail as their market strategy.

> Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings

so a PR campaign,

> https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f...

top comment from the same page: so, I found the Yelp page, and there are 26 reviews filtered out. Of those, the reviewers have a combined 27 friends, and they all come from just 5 people. None of them has more than 15 reviews, and the majority have less than 3. If you have almost no friends and almost no reviews, your reviews are probably going to get filtered out. Also, a lot of her 5-star reviews happened in a 3-day period, which reeks of fake-reviews,

> Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion?

you have not yet demonstrated "money means hiding bad reviews" but already sure it's extortion,

> Forbes article - Court Says Yelp Doesn't Extort Businesses

oooook?

> cnet article

article about same business from your first link

> when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need?

you've made a claim, i believe you forgot to include the "proof"? that specific claim by the way is trivially demonstrable using wayback machine

> However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service.

...and that you have reason to dislike Yelp or even think they are hypocritical does not counteract the problem with Google, which is the topic at hand, making your comment seem like nothing more than a defense of vigilanteism :/.

I would accept the accusation of defense of vigilantism, but I only highlighted the issue. I see it as a "Pot calls Kettle Black", but I do not advocate a response, other than that the courts handled it incorrectly.

I can have fault with both Google/Alphabet and Yelp. They each can have their own form of hypocrisy and potentially illegal behaviors. Me calling one out doesn't lessen the other's actions.

You've behaved so atrociously in this thread—with personal attacks, rants, and other violations of HN's guidelines—that you managed to sacrifice whatever high ground you began from and end up well in the hole. It's dismaying to see how much damage a single commenter on tilt can do.

We ban people for this kind of thing, so please don't do it again. Civil and substantive comments only (or no comments) from now on, please.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697996 and marked it off-topic.

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