Yelp Claims Google Broke Promise Made to Regulators

I've seen it first hand. My friend is a veternarian who was working in a very expensive neighborhood in California. Every time he got a 5 star review, it wouldn't display on his Yelp page. A few 1 star reviews did appear though. Yelp would call him and tell him essentially the 5 stars would reappear if he advertised with them. He had no choice but to pay and they all appeared, driving his average back up. How would you propose to prove it? And what would proving accomplish since many folks already believe it?

Here are some first hand accounts from the trailer for Billion Dollar Bully

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

Enough people have left Yelp that if there were black programs in place, we would know.

I totally believe that there are some shady salespeople at Yelp that talk about... the implications. But I doubt they actually do sell improved ratings.

Additionally, you could literally ask anyone who worked at Yelp. I have. Sure not everyone there has seen every bit of code that powers their service, or every business process, but if they were systemically encouraging mobster-like business tactics, someone would have heard about it. I never did. I heard a lot of engineers and sales people laughing about the fact that people thought they did.

The reality is that its likely explainable through a combination of disgruntled business owners and overzealous/evil salespeople who make threats they can't follow through on, just to get sales.

(Though, some of the admin panels there have (or had, when I was there) a easy to use "Make user Yelp Elite" button, but I'm sure you'd get caught :)

Seems that they attempted to, but they can't definitively disprove it.

Basically, they couldn't find evidence, but they can't disprove the hypothesis and they can only tell from the year 2012. Thus, they can't see if stores let their advertising expire before that year or see the reviews stores had before advertising if they started before that.

Yelp is indeed sht company and needs to be investigated for its own shakedown techniques. But this doesn't mean that Google isn't behaving in an anti-competitive way.

Side note, Yelp literally called my partner who ran PR for non profits art org and asked to be paid $$ or else competitors ads would run on their page. Literal words. One would pay for NOTHING except not having competitors getting promoted on your own pages.

Partner laughed and hung up.

> Not sure which app/service is responsible for it

Google Maps. It also asks questions sometimes like "Does this place only accept cash?" or "Is this place wheelchair accessible?"

I think recently they even added a feature that lets people ask their own questions which then get answered by people who recently visited the place in question.

robots.txt is a publicly accessible list of pages that bots aren't allowed to go to. It's like publishing a list of home addresses you don't want robbed because you have something good there. So, some bad crawlers might go to the robots.txt since it tells you where the good stuff is hidden.

(In reality, it's likely nobody would put actual secret URLs in the robots.txt, but some developers might without thinking. This is likely just one of many ways Yelp attempts to catch bad webcrawlers.)

To catch and block scripts scraping Yelp in ways they don't like.

If you fetch that url, you are most likely a bot that isn't following the rules and can be flagged or blocked outright without impacting any real users or search engine rankings no matter what your user agent claims to be.

I assume the GP was using their browser to access these links, though they still be blacklisted by Yelp?

Why would a scraper who doesn't respect robots.txt be accessing that file?

Because they whitelist the exit IP for the phone network, else one person could block access for millions.