CBS “60 Minutes” piece on Google’s abuse of dominance
yelpblog.com
yelpblog.com
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yelp sucks so not a top link. Seems to be working in a fair manner.
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.
A classic example of a business that Google should be using their dominance against, but aren't.
All just glorified databases with different UI really. Yelp kind of has original content in people’s opinion of db entries.
YouTube however is slightly different since people post short and long form video on which is mostly original.
Interesting.
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?
Yelp missed the industrialization of their industry by machine.
Knowing what you're doing isn't monopolistic.
Please describe what you consider a fair practice to seize a market in general terms.
For a lot of popular queries the results are dominated by paid directories, aggregators and such that offer no great value to consumers.
Google's listings tend to be more accurate in terms of location and the reviews more reliable.
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
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?
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.
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.
Just my 2 cents.
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.
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.
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?
For example, Booking.com, etc.
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.
I am based in Europe though so maybe this isn't a universal experience?
It was just Yelp sour grapes and curious how it even made it on 60 minutes?
I would be, dare I say it, willing to subscribe to a cheap platform that would do both better.
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.
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.
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, 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.
Capitalism does not produce good quality products and services without genuine competition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the times I've searched for places to eat at 10pm or later, no. I just wanted to find the place.
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.
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.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad-re... [2] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-rev... [3] https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove-negative-reviews-in-e...
There were many search engines before Google. Reason Google won is because they provide better results.
Heck MS owns the desktop and still lost search.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238051
[2] http://kaohana.windward.hawaii.edu/2017/05/yelp-extortion-is...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238079
[4] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/01/yelp-accused-of-hiding-po...
[5] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/yelp-bullying-pay-r...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instead of Yelp b*tching on 60 minutes they should fix the service and then they would be higher on search.
It is how it works.
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.
So, why don't I type "yelp.com", when I want to go somewhere?
There is nothing to complain about, when your product sucks.
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.
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.
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.
People use the address bar as a query line - increasingly with voice commands over the address bar even.
So, whomever runs the search tool behind the search bar (overwhelmingly google) controls the product space.
I'm old enough to type in a URL, I rarely see anyone else who does that anymore.
Also, it's laughable that of all companies, Yelp is the one complaining about Google.
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.
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.
Literally, that's what the original paper says:
> 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.
"Improvement": Post Google's own offering first and also fill page with ads to keep users within Google's own sites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate on this? Show some nyt/whatever articles and explain what they got wrong? (What they omitted, etc.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEbVh3Yhrw (recent interview with the film creator)
From staring at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1299637435/billion-doll... I’d guess they’re still looking for or going through a distributor.
The shakedown to not have competitor's ads displayed on "Your Yelp Page" is fking deplorable. It could be a whole lot of fun to be Attorney General.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 can't say it was all their secret goal from the beginning, but it now is.
Why can't google have their own products'/services' links at the top of all search results?
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.
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.
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?
This entire thing is ridiculous. Google is obviously not gaming results.
Yelp sucks so lower down. Make it better and be higher like Amazon.
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?
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.
Just like on Windows the default search is Bing and default browser Edge just no body uses them because they suck.
Bing is even two characters less and still not used. Are we honestly going to penalize a company for creating better products?
I find this funny since Google directly finances a competing browser.
For years, Google made more money on iOS than Android even after Androids market share eclipsed iOS’s market share.
We in Earth would we penalize someone for creating a superior product?
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.
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”.