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Comment by johnnyfaehell | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there.

Who is to decide what is a crappy 2nd rate product? To me, Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. Can the same be held true for Google?

> They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers.

If it was donated, how was it theft?

> Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape?

They were never prevented from competing, they were prevented from preventing others competing.

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> Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews.

This is a dubious claim.

There have been periodic blowups about Yelp offering to manipulate how reviews are presented for money. [1][2] Yelp portrays this as advertising [3], like putting a "favorite" review "above the fold" so to speak, but many business owners consistently tell the same story about extortion over negative reviews.

I never paid it much attention before, but recently someone I personally know mentioned that her boss (at the time) was paying to remove negative Yelp reviews, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Point is, even if they aren't directly deleting negative reviews, reviews are their main product and pressure over negative reviews seems to be at the very least a sales tactic, so don't be so sure they have no financial benefit from manipulating at least certain aspects of reviews--it's not inconceivable.

[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...

Superior? Yelp is awful. Make a better product and it would be higher in search. This is sour grapes and really worry we are going to end up with a worse search engine.

There were many search engines before Google. Reason Google won is because they provide better results.

Heck MS owns the desktop and still lost search.

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