Google “hijacked millions of customers and orders” from restaurants – lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Google “hijacked millions of customers and orders” from restaurants – lawsuit

arstechnica.com

434 pointsJaimeThompson211 comments

I've seen this when searching for restaurants, and I spotted it right away. It's a classic dark pattern and I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this.

Google search results have become dangerous (for lack of a better word) and really hard to use when searching for some things lately. I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me. I understand they want to squeeze every possible dollar out of every search, but I no longer trust them for certain searches.

I'm not even talking about the results, this is just what's on the actual Google search results page. There's just way too many ads and other tricks like this happening.

The irony is that these techniques are against their own TOS for Adsense/Adwords, but I guess it's more of a "do as I say, not as I do" sort of situation.

That reminds me of an old tweet from someone to Matt Cutts (at least I think it was Cutts). MC had tweeted a reply to someone about how they don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites. Someone else replied to him with a screenshot of Google's search results page that had scraped and reused something from somewhere and said "I think I found one of those sites for you". (Hoping I remember that at least somewhat close to how it happened! It's a somewhat faded memory from several years ago)

Funny, I guess. But pages that scrape short excerpts from other sites and link back to them in order to provide additional value to a user absolutely are allowed by Google. Sites that scrape large portions of text and don't credit it back aren't allowed and would be illegal.

An example of an allowed page doing this would be a "recipe roundup" where a site lists 10 or so recipes in a particular theme (like Best Keto Breakfast Recipes) and each one links back to the original recipe with a short description.

I'm not surprised this sort of "gotcha" was popular on Twitter though (and is why I don't use Twitter)

Only, google rarely credits the sources they scraped for infoboxes.

For things that are considered facts they don't. But for Featured Snippets they do. If something is a widely recognized fact you don't need to credit a source in your own writing too

Google gets "facts" wrong pretty often because it gathers them by scraping. There are too many possible facts for them to have all been verified by a human.

Is some random celebrity's net worth a "widely recognized fact"?

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

You did not understand my comment - I said Featured Snippets are NOT necessarily facts and DO link to the source.

Featured Snippets drive a lot of traffic to sites and as a publisher I instruct my writers on how to craft their sentences to make it more likely we will get a Featured Snippet. Yes, Featured Snippets probably reduced the CTR for pages that were previously ranking #1 but that comes with an increase in user experience.

Part of the confusion here stems from the fact you used an ambiguous term like "infobox" that has no real meaning and I interpreted as the box that appears on the sidebar when Googling certain topics (like somebody's name). This typically pulls data from Wikipedia and Wikidata as FACTS.

So if by infobox you meant Featured Snippet then your comment was incorrect because Google does in fact always link back the original site (maybe in the last they sometimes didn't? I can't speak to that but I'm doubtful)

Also I'll just say this - the website in question in that article was relying on Google for all their traffic for a very particular type of query. That is just stupid. I'm a publisher and wouldn't be able to sleep at night if my site was like theirs.

Technically Net Worth is a fact and that's why Google was trying to put it in their Knowledge Graph. But since it's not typically public knowledge it becomes more of an opinion. Hence, it's a Featured Snippet with credit to the source. That site is just mad they don't always get the Featured Snippet so their traffic went down. They weren't complaining when Google was ranking them #1 were they?

That did happen, as you describe it.

The top search result was Google scraping from wikipedia.

> don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites.

I remember there used to be ranking penalties against scraper sites. I have not been following Google's SEO rules in a while, so does anyone know what happened to it?

It's essentially the 'duplicate content' penalty/penalties. [1]

It's pretty ironic really... take a look at this scenario...

Let's say we have Website A which we'll consider a "legitimate" website producing unique and quality content and we have Website B which is not, but it has some clever people running it's scrapers/submissions..

Developer responsible for Website B has identified that Website A produces quality content that it wants to steal - setups up a scraper to check for updates on Website A, when it finds them it will immediately scrape the content and repost it on Website B. Then they will update their sitemap and submit it to Google (or some other of the various ways to 'alert' google of a new page/updated content) which will trigger a crawl of that page/website.

If this crawl/index of Website B happens before Website A - who does Google see as the producer of that content and who is now the "duplicate"?

Whack-a-mole.

1: https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content

I just tried making reservations for an anniversary dinner, so I Google "Obstinate Daughter" and they put up a little widget for Resy and lo and behold there are no good reservations times available despite it being zero-dark-thirty on the first day one could even make reservations for my targeted date.

Now I'm a bit skeptical that the city collectively got up at the ass-crack of dawn to make a dinner reservation on a random weeknight, so I go visit the restaurant website and they have a wide open calendar. Had I not scrutinized the Google offerings the restaurant would have lost out on my business.

IANAL but that whole offering on the part of Google just seems morally wrong if not some form of fraudulent.

So I wonder what's the end game of a pattern like this? Is it a shakedown type of situation where if a restaurant doesn't pay up to enable some reservations "integration" they will be shown as fully booked by default?

Google does all kinds of stupid things like this. They constantly change how they interpret data and punish anyone who doesn't (or can't) follow the new rules.

They'll suddenly require X to be valid against a specific standard, but the maker of the product you sell doesn't follow X. Oh, and omitting X is the same as having an invalid X.

Frankly, it's ridiculous. We have to have an entire paid position just for dealing with Google's bullshit.

As far as I see that restaurant just does in fact use Resy and it looks to me like Google just shows the same results the Resy site does. What they do do is just not show you times that are outside a window around the selected time (and they preselect one) so maybe that's the issue?

I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.

Yep. I noticed this when they started doing it in maps. I always wonder what their commission is, which is in turn part of the commission for Grubhub or any other food delivery service.

You have to make a real effort to avoid their crap hurdles just to make it to the damn restaurant’s own website.

"I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me."

I've noticed it only a handful of times, but phone numbers for listings, can't be trusted either anymore [1]

GrubHub also does it: there has been more than one occasion where I've searched a restaurant in a new town while traveling for work, called the phone number to inquire about a menu item thinking I was dialing the restaurant but I had instead dialed a GrubHub or Goggle contact center.

At first I didn't realize what was going on, but quickly put it together after ordering from a restaurant that appeared in Google, using the "order form" and getting a phone call from a different voice telling me the item I ordered hadn't been sold by the restaurant in weeks due to sourcing issues.

"I just spoke with Mark, he said you do sell it"

"We don't have anyone named Mark working here"

I go check the listing again, check the phone number, and ask the person on the other end of the line what the restaurant business telephone number is: sure enough it's a completely different number.

Not sure how widespread this is or how to tell which restaurant phone numbers on these platforms take me to someone actually at the establishment, but....well...shit like this.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-res.... (article is from 2019 but this has happened to me as recently as oct/2021)

Do they actually pretend to be the restaurant on the phone, like they answer with "Tony's Pizza" if that's the restaurant?

They did, yes.

I’m not qualified to know whether or not this counts as some kind of fraud, but it was the final straw for me to stop using these delivery services once and for all after other unrelated negative experiences with them.

IANAL, but for the websites, it's easily trademark infringement. In-N-Out notably sued DoorDash over them using the In-N-Out logo on the site.[0]

It's understandable why. If a customer receives a bad order due to GrubHub, DoorDash, etc., it reflects badly on the restaurant, even if it's not their fault. See claim 29 from the filing[1]:

> Defendant’s use of Plaintiff’s famous trademarks implies that Defendant not only delivers In-N-Out products to its customers, but that the quality and services offered by Defendant is the same as if consumers had made purchases directly from Plaintiff. Upon information and belief, the quality of services offered by Defendant does not at all comport with the standards that consumers expect from Plaintiff’s goods and services. Further, Plaintiff has no control over the time it takes Defendant to deliver Plaintiff’s goods to consumers, or over the temperature at which the goods are kept during delivery, nor over the food handling and safety practices of Defendant’s delivery drivers. While Plaintiff adheres to the Food Code, on information and belief, Defendant does not adhere to such regulations, including with regard to compliance with required food safety and handling practices.

[0]: https://money.cnn.com/2015/11/12/technology/in-n-out-doordas...

[1]: https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...

Grubhub has been notorious for doing this for years. It's not surprising that Google is trying to take their cut.

this is one area where the FTC should be stepping in, It should be seen as blatant fraud for a business to represent themselves as another business to the point where users are confused who they are actually calling.

It always amazes me that the government is never concerned with things is SHOULD BE, instead is very concerned with things that should be none of its business.

From that endgadget article: Users wouldn't have ordered food "without our platform," company spokesperson Brendan Lewis said.

Ah yes, if it wasn't for GrubHub, we would all starve!

I've never seen the middle-man parasite's lie exposed this clearly. People have been ordering direct from restaurants for ages, but now that Yelp/Grubhub managed to muscle their way between restaurants and customers, they take credit for this entire business existing, to justify their sleazy practices.

It's a common talking point that if not for landlords (landleeches), nobody would have houses.

The bias is explicit here with the reference to "landleeches", but I'm still curious. Not everyone is able or willing to own a house, so landlords offer their property for rent. Typically the rent is determined by market value (supply and demand). What is the alternative in your mind? Would government fulfill that role? Or do you imagine some utopia where everyone can buy a house?

The alternative is that people could simply buy houses if they didn't have to compete with landlords.

When people turn a necessity (housing) into an investment (and by extension, a source of profit), then people/companies with means will buy up as much as they can and hold it, reducing the supply and raising the price of something that people _have_ to have. So, saying rent is "determined by market value" as if "the market" is an impartial omniscient force is misleading.

For a lot of the 20th century, _most_ people could buy a house regardless of their chosen occupation ("most" is doing a lot of work here- there's a long history of racism tied into housing acquisition, but my basic point is the same). You could be a blue collar tradesman and buy a house for your family of 4. So yes, I think that's definitely a (theoretical) possibility.

It's not outlandish either. We already have a much healthier model to copy: cars. There's no one buying up _all_ the cars and then leasing them to you at artificially high prices. There's (normally, chip shortages notwithstanding) plenty of cars and you can pick what best suits you- new / old / cheap / expensive / fancy / plain / etc. Housing could be the same way if the goal wasn't to extract profit out of those who can't afford to buy (or weren't born 60 years ago).

I always try to go the website. But I think adding some murk is that some restaurants use third party order systems

like by door dash via the generic: https://order.online/en-US/

For example this is a doordash site (set up by the restaurant): https://order.online/business/-54797/en-US

A restaurant tried to call me about an order, but coming from a toll free number I ignored it. I asked them why they didn't have a local number. They could only call me back via the door dash number as my number wasn't provided to the restaurant. It was weird.

Around here the local restaurant POS vendor exposed their interface online and made and app for pickups. I'll use that directly if I'm ordering from a place that uses it. Thats a little fraught too, because the staff has to learn to use that too (staff has to have some training on turing online ordering on or off..which they sometimes have forgotten to do)

https://pos.toasttab.com

Remember, that DoorDash is YC13.

Ycombinator is enabling this kind of behavior, either historically or currently.

I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. And barring active influence, they should outwardly denounce companies that choose to engage in these kinds of scams.

(I have a private plugin that does company searches and sees if they are a YC company. You'd be really surprised just how many negative articles are YC founded companies.)

Edit: and the downvotes commence

Yea, I don’t see YC as any kind of moral filter despite it appears to have that kind of halo.

I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior.

Why do you call out YC specifically? Maybe I missed the memo, but I don't look at companies coming out of YC as being made from some special moral fiber. Quite the contrary in a lot of cases, and DoorDash is just one example. If there's anything YC is "auditing", my guess is that it's a P/L sheet, not questionable business decisions.

> Why do you call out YC specifically?

They run a massive social media site (HN is that massive). It's why you and I are here. It's why on Twitter this place is known as "That Orange Place", and YC, and HN.

And, because of their clout, they SHOULD be leading the way on ethical venture capital.

And by shoving the Overton Window more towards ethical VC funding, and denouncing shitty companies when they start to engage in unethical or borderline-illegal behavior, they can be the trend-setters in aiming the trajectories of what SV and other high tech areas are.

Fair enough, I agree that it would be nice if YC were leading the way, as you say. And why hold YC’s feet to the fire more than any other? Okay, the massive social media site they put their name on. Maybe it’s my old-man cynicism, but I just don’t see that justifying an expectation that YC do better, just an explanation of why they should do better.

Anyway, not disagreeing, and thank you for the response explaining where you’re coming from.

> my number wasn't provided to the restaurant.

When I was interning for a consultancy one of my assignments was to create a system that could be placed in restaurants to mitm printer jobs so that our low fee delivery service could scrape phone numbers and emails from third party delivery receipts and send coupons to get customers to switch to our service. Doordash probably figured out this sort of stuff was happening so took all the identifying info out of their service?

That makes sense.

Lots of restaurants around here use Toast and I'll pretty much always use that if it's available.

I get a nice consistent interface, it remembers my name/payment across the different restaurants that use it, and as far as I've seen they're not a raw deal for the restaurant. Square I think is pretty similar? Though I just don't personally see as many places using it for online ordering.

This Google feature unfortunately seems to favor the high-commission major apps in its listings, though the "native" one where Google itself shows an ordering interface seems to be a no-commission DoorDash thing, at least for the restaurants I've seen? Which still has "extra-middleman" problems but at least isn't so bad financially.

> I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this.

My guess is that most restaurants don’t even know where to begin when it comes to suing something like Google. At least that’s how I would feel.

I could be wrong here, but, I think the lawsuit is totally misdirected. Restaurants should be upset with the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) instead.

The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent. (Or, perhaps worse, offering orders without restaurant consent?)

Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2]

I don't think Google even takes a cut!

I worked on an integration to a similar API, "Reserve with Google" [3]. With that one, at least, it can be enabled/disabled at the restaurant level. I assume that "Order with Google" is similar.

[1] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering

[2] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering/guides/b...

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/reserve/

Depends, if paid ads were involved to list e.g. DoorDash higher on the results then I think google should deserve some of the blame.

I don't think you can blame Google for allowing a delivery operator to buy ads on a restaurant's name.

If it's the delivery operator's business model to buy ads to get a cut of an order, then, we should be upset with the delivery operator.

(edit: removed off topic and specific business)

I think it's perfectly reasonable to blame/be upset with both the delivery operator (for infringing upon the restaurant's trademark by causing confusion as to the source of goods/services), and the e-commerce platform for knowingly facilitating/allowing the trademark infringement to occur on its platform. This is called 'secondary' or 'contributory' infringement in legal jargon.

I would be shocked if google didn't get a cut, or at least a pay per click. Just doesn't seem like them not to

It could be more of a strategic play to keep eyeballs on Google properties and further build the advertising profile. Also provides a foothold into entering the ordering/delivery/reservation businesses at a much later date if they so choose.

IIRC Google didn't take a cut on restaurant reservations, at least

The article addresses this, with the following quote:

> We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature

It could of course be a lie, but that seems like a bad strategy.

Imagine every part of Google is a neural network black box that has machine-learned to say and do whatever makes the company the most profit as a whole, lawsuits deducted.

It can't deduct the value of lawsuits until it gets training data.

The data is incoming, no worries.

Google takes a cut when those companies pay for ads on the platform. It's the old switcheroo...

For many years Google had run their search engine as a trusted source for indexed search with advertising subtly placed. Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges. It's so bad now that the only way I can ensure that I'm not being overcharged for no good reason is to order by phone or directly at restaurants. There is very little value added to so many online businesses now because of twisted Internet schemes like this.

> Google takes a cut when those companies pay for ads on the platform.

> I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges.

That's definitely true, but that's not what's being discussed.

Be aware of platforms publishing a 'proxy' phone number so they can still collect their fees: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756878/yelp-grubhub-comm...

Why? Do you also beware of restaraunt waiters collecting a fee for bringing you food you could get directly from the cook?

If you want to undercut an affilate referral, go to the restaurant ditrctlry instead of a third party leadgen site.

> If you want to undercut an affilate referral, go to the restaurant ditrctlry instead of a third party leadgen site.

The whole issue is that the leadgen site is pretending to be the real restaurant to collect a fee. This isn’t just “why complain that DoorDash takes a fee when you use DoorDash”. It’s “company X is pretending to be restaurant Y in order to add a fee while providing no value added”.

> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

Slightly off topic, but as an example of this, I did a search for the manufacturer part number of a brushed DC motor the other day. It was just a randomish string of characters like S-5672 or something, and under image results and all the results were completely unrelated pictures of an entirely different brushless motor that I had recently purchased. The seeming effect of this is that Google knew I was looking for a specific product, and chose to show me a competing product instead, despite them not being comparable.

I have found their search to be less and less useful for things like this when it used to be great. Even searching in quotes has gotten much less "exact". If you really want to do an exact search you have to quote it AND now also check a box for "exact results" in the little search options dropdown.

The lesson is don't use Google search in a browser where you have their login cookies. Set up an extension that wipes their cookies when a tab is closed. Restrict logged in Google activity to a separate browser or profile that won't be used to build a behavioral profile.

> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

Do you mean for restaurant results specifically or all Google Search results? Big difference if both.

It's fascinating to me that the search results page on mobile is often three-ish screens of non-website links. Instead, it's ads, answers, images, and other random stuff. These things are either monetized or scraped from someone's website.

> The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent.

The lawsuit seems to focus on the history of how that happened a bit. Namely Google seems to have initially tried to sell this API to restaurants directly. Hence the brazen trademark infringement and restaurant impersonation, it was intended to operate with the authorization of the restaurants directly. Only when that failed did they move on to third party distributors that didn't have any right to the trademarks, without changing the now deceptive interface.

> I don't think Google even takes a cut!

The lawsuit is a bit unclear on that (through information and belief) but also cites alternative revenue streams through ads and pushing more people onto its own payment platform.

> Namely Google seems to have initially tried to sell this API to restaurants directly.

...which was a fools errand. It is impossible to expect individual restaurants (_maybe_ aside from large restaurant groups - ie, big chains) to integrate with this API.

To me it seems much more likely that Google pivoted to working directly with delivery operators for practical reasons to make the product functional.

I would also bet that contracts with the delivery operators include a bit about how they will enable this integration and what that means. Perhaps they do not make it explicit enough in the sales cycle (or, didn't in the case of Lime)

Google doesn’t take a cut yet.

Bingo. Cripple the competition now, then turn on the money spigot whenever they want.

Or wait until you gain critical mass, and then pull the plug on the entire project since it's not making money. It is the Googs after all.

Good take. This made me thing of all the GOogle failures in a different light. It isn't just that they abandon users. They also crush competitors in the initial phase (by being free, or generally having Google branding), only to pull the plug. We often talk about the users left with having to find an alternative, but not the competitors they crushed along the way.

In ads and commerce, Google has much longer time horizon... e.g. froogle was launched in 2002 and they rebranded and "turned on the spigot" in 2012.

Google wouldn't do that because ... well ... because don't be evil

Or discontinue the feature completely when the director in charge of the project gets bored with it

Not sure how that happens unless they decide to launch their own DoorDash clone.

Froogle 2.0? Let them signup and invest integration efforts to get an intial free spigot of traffic, then yank the rug and start charging on a per unit basis once it reaches critical mass.

It is completely irrelevant if Google takes a cut or not. Google uses the restaurant's brand name to enable one of their delivery partners to undercut the restaurant's own delivery system.

The nature of the partnership between Google and the delivery firm is not directly relevant to the restaurant's loss of revenue. They could be building a future business, they could be compensated in an indirect fashion (ex. those who pay more to AdSense get a preferential treatment) etc.

I honestly don’t know how restaurants even get a say in the matter. Ultimately, as a customer I am placing a to-go order and hiring somebody to go pick it up for me.

DoorDash has made an effort to streamline the process. If to-go orders are an option then you really don’t get a choice in who I send to pick it up.

They get a say because those companies were doing everything they can not to let the customer know about that disconnect. Many customers thought the restaurant had agreed to the service, and were holding the restaurant responsible for mistakes the delivery companies made.

I'm not quite willing to call it fraud yet, but it's in that area.

I can understand that aspect of it.

> I'm not quite willing to call it fraud yet,

Great. So if you're happy with just a bit of disconnect, I'll get down the dump and pick up some old oil drums and fire up a kitchen in the garage. What do you fancy? KFC? Nandos?

No. If we can pretend to represent someone else without their concent, based on unverified 3rd party data, then we're cooking with tinned worms.

They get a say through trademark law. If you show the KFC logo or even name on a service, you have to seek KFC's permission to do so.

As long as you're reselling actual KFC products, you are not likely violating their trademark. However, if you deceive the customer into thinking they are buying directly from KFC, then you likely are.

In a similar situation, Ferrari has often attempted to keep independent repair shops from using the Ferrari name and logo to advertise that they service Ferrari cars. They've lost quite a few times.

All that said, you can still run into copyright issues when reproducing somebody's logo.

Not sure, who would pay the bill for the food poisoning?

If you are reselling my food am I still responsible for it?

Say you heat the container on your bike to a danger zone temperature. Say the order sits at the bottom but you have the same order on top. The food at the bottom could sit there all day.

Say I've also undercooked the chicken.

Who is to blame?

Some restaurants don’t offer delivery for quality reasons. When Doordash impersonates those businesses the reputation of the restaurant is at risk.

It’s a classic case of internalizing the gains and externalizing the costs.

takeout /= delivery

Exactly. Doordash makes takeout places look like delivery.

Regardless of the underlying technical implementation, Google is offering an unsolicited Order Now feature to its users under the restaurants' brand.

The problem is that Google makes it look like it's part of the restaurant's own Google Business account but then directs to a 3rd party without the restaurant's explicit consent.

This is a very good point and I think perhaps, from a logic point of view, a huge issue.

> Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2]

> I don't think Google even takes a cut!

Yes officer, I did leave the bank door unlocked as a favor to my friend, but I didn't even get any of the stolen money!

This is a fair take. But in your analogy, we'd go after the thief, too, right? And the thief would get a harsher sentence?

Yet there's no lawsuit against the thief.

Door dash is odious and needs a comeuppance, no question. But their theft does not acquit their accomplices.

> Yet there's no lawsuit against the thief.

Maybe they want to fight Google first and then sue the other parties depending on how the Google lawsuit goes.

I just wish there was a way to disable that integration. I have to go out of my way to avoid using it and go directly to the restaurant site to place the order.

I had this happen to me. Went to order something for pickup from maps. I thought it was the restaurant's page but the order went through postmates. When I arrived to pick up my order, the staff seemed to think I was an employee of postmates.

Anyway, when I got home I did some searching and found out the restaurant had a different webpage from what I ordered from. The prices I paid were a little higher than the actual business websites. It seems postmates charged me more, taking a cut while doing nothing to make the food or deliver it. What a parasitic business to inject yourself as a third party like that.

There's been quite a few companies doing some growth hacking, or I guess straight up stealing by putting their url as the url for a restaurant. It's hard to trust anything Google maps tells me since there's no real source of truth.

Zomato needs to be banned from Google maps.

>growth hacking

This is just techbro euphemism for "lie to your users."

This particular instance is definitely lying to users, but in general "growth hacking" isn't necessarily so evil. Like adding "sent with Hotmail" at the bottom of the free email service, or offering a printable certificate of your store's Yelp rating to show off to in-person customers.

I thought it was a euphemism for "lie to your investors"?

Zomato is the worst thing I have seen. I stopped using it and moved to Swiggy. To order from zomato, you need their app, you cannot order from their website. On swiggy, you can either order from their website or app.

I like to order stuff of any service from their website. Usually, the play/app store apps are filled with ads, trackers, spyware.

I had much the same problem, ordered from my favorite local Mexican place for delivery, but Doordash apparently had no agreement with the restaurant, despite holding themselves out as the restaurant. Instead, they posted a menu with incorrect items, incorrect prices and just sent someone to stand in line to order from them.

Needless to say, the food was incorrectly ordered, an hour late and cold. To top it all off, they attempted to charge me for the difference in price. Luckily, I put a stop to this via my credit card, and have boycotted Doordash since.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon amongst the various food delivery companies, despite being obvious fraud.

It's so common you have to assume Google is happy with the way it works. Flowers, locksmiths, tow trucks, etc. all have parasites like that in their industry. Basically anything where you don't need to be there physically is going to have someone trying to game the system to act as a middle man that does nothing.

My mother got scammed by the flowers version by clicking on a Google Ad and not realizing she was dealing with a middleman that was doing nothing more than adding $50 to local prices and calling in orders. And when people that don't realize what's going on feel like they got ripped off, the real business seems to be the one that gets the bad review.

The easiest thing to do is to assume Google is nothing but spam and scams. I'm convinced there's a market opportunity for local web indexes similar to what Yahoo used to be because there's nothing to use for discovery that isn't trying to scam you.

Google is the closest group to the consumer here, but the actual bad actors are DoorDash / GrubHub / etc. The delivery companies add the restaurants to their sites without permission, then Google indexes those pages and provides smart widgets for them.

Take away the delivery companies’ bad practices, you take away the Google experience the restaurants don’t like.

If DoorDash and GrubHub are the bad actors, and what they're doing is well enough known that people on HN know about it, why can't Google adjust their algorithms accordingly? Hell, with two big companies like that they could just sanction them directly for subverting the algorithms.

I think it makes the most sense to hold Google responsible here since they are in the best position to solve the problem and they're not showing any inclination to do so.

Funny how there is pushback on the YCombinator forum to an attempt to hold accountable a YCombinator company that actually has a direct hand in doing this to restaurants.

How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't? The vast majority of these postings are fine/legitimate/consented. Why does it have to be Google that spends time and energy going after the bad actors, and if they don't, they become one?

In other words, I really don't see how Google is in the best position to figure out which restaurants have been posted without the restaurant's consent. I think that would be the companies putting up the original post.

> How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't?

Oh, that's the best part. Google doesn't have to. DoorDash and GrubHub know. So Google can offer to derank all their listings and offerings or they can police them themselves.

"In two weeks, Google will be taking action against companies that regularly interject their own phone numbers in place of actual brick-and-mortar locations in an attempt to use SEO to siphon off sales. We look forward to our partners policing their listings to ensure all colistings are voluntary."

Probably not a good idea for Google to go after other companies in this way given all the antitrust specter.

NYTimes headline

“Google abusing monopoly position to muscle out delivery startups”

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#percei...

"Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions."

There it is, in a nutshell, how company owners are able to brigade as a collective group.

Trivial. DoorDash has been caught doing this. Add this to TOS. If DoorDash persists, remove them from all searches until they prove they have fixed the issue and pay a penalty for bad behavior.

> How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't?

There's a very very simple algorithm for this.

    Do I have a direct business relationship with this company?
     |
     |-> Yes -> take orders on their behalf
     |-> No  -> Do not take orders on their behalf

I thought it was Grubhub/Doordash actually taking the orders, Google is just providing a link to their service.

Google has a big blue button that says "make an order". Sounds like they're taking orders to me.

Honestly, if Doordash is a known bad actor (and it is), Google just just blacklist all results from them. That will hurt Doordash far more than it hurts Google or consumers.

Same reason Google engineers don't delist sites like gitmemory and don't stop writing bots that automatically can people's accounts without recourse. They just don't care enough to leverage their vast power.

No single Google employee can solve the "no recourse" part of accounts being removed when they trigger automated abuse systems, unless you expect them to be the only ones to maintain the support inbox for that recourse. Any change for the better has to be done by committee, legal, PR, etc. and unauthorized changes are surely going to be cause for termination and/or criminal proceedings against the rogue employee, depending on how much they changed things without permission.

I'm not talking about rogue employees, I'm talking about the team that was tasked with creating the system. Google pays them millions because Google needs them, that gives engineers a lot of leverage.

I don't know the specifics, though -- maybe the proposed project was much much worse and this is what the engineers were able to negotiate. But I kinda doubt it.

Not excusing anyone but, AFAICT, DoorDash and GrubHub are extremely popular. Google is just giving consumers what they want. I have friends who eat > 50% of their meals via DoorDash. I live in an apartment complex and see tons of orders coming in. So, maybe it sucks for the restaurants and that should be fix but it seems hard to knock Google for doing what their metrics say people actually want. Their metrics probably say people want to order food and so they tried to provide that info. There no need for to apply "evil" motivations. Good intentions gets the same result.

I don't think people care that much whether it's DoorDash or GrubHub or Ubereats that's taking their order. Food is what's popular and getting it delivered is very convenient. But this is not just for delivery orders. Pickup orders are affected as well.

When DoorDash can place a link to their service on the Google result for a restaurant, it looks like it is a legitimate part of the restaurant's service. When they do this in a deceptive manner (without the restaurant's permission), it harms both customer and restaurant, because prices are often higher, there are extra service fees, and Doordash takes a big cut of the sale. And in the case of pickup orders, they get this big cut of the profit without adding a single bit of value to the transaction. And the customer may never even know who they were dealing with.

Just because someone somewhere hosts a website saying X doesn’t mean Google must assume their an authoritative source.

Google could temporarily delist those sites and instantly get them to stop.

No, Google is part of the problem here too. https://orderfood.google.com/

No, Google is far from helpless in detection of these types of issues. Business owners should be able to claim and manage the features which are enabled on their accounts, and nothing should be enabled by default beyond the basic contact info and possibly reviews.

I passed on a case like this years ago -- a restaurant claimed Google hijacked the listing, it turns out they had signed a B2B deal with some food delivery/ordering app that had, in the terms, the right to share this info with others, including Google. Good luck to the restaurant here, but they won't get the same benefit of the doubt consumers (sometimes) get when signing contracts.

I was just in a coffee shop the other day and a man was telling the clerk he called in an order, and they took it, and he is there to pick it up. The shop had no record of this, and the number that he called was not their number. He said that is really weird, I talked to someone and they took my order.

I remembered the dark pattern deployed by GrubHub, and googled the shop. Sure enough the number was the same as the one the man called. The shop had no idea that this was going on, and apparently GrubHub failed to forward that order. This is being done with little or no indication to either party that someone is in the middle.

Isn't this fraud, on the part of Google, Grub Hub, or both? The customer thinks they're dealing with the business, but one of these two services has MITM'd the service, passing themselves off as the business.

Yes. We should be contacting local attorney generals or equivalent.

I pulled the plug on Google Search about two months ago and switched to Brave's new search engine. It works for me. Search is a tough product because nearly every way you come up with to monetize it counts in either diluting the SERPs with paid listings or diverting clicks to something other than what the user is looking for. I.e. I search for a movie and get the Google movie listing instead of a listing for the website for the actual movie.

On Brave Search: I've had to use Google search twice in the past month, and it was useful one of those times, so Brave has been fantastic so far. In the past,the new search engine usually lasts about 3-4 days and I give up and go back to Google. This time... well... still using Brave.

My experience with Brave Search has been fantastic as well. I also like the UI much more than any other search engine I've used.

Monetization wouldn’t be an issue if we paid for these services. I’d be willing to pay $5-10 a month for a good search engine that respects your privacy. But I guess the average person hates the idea of paying for any software these days.

Like paying for a smart TV does not make advertising on smart TVs an issue?

Well that’s just greed, or driving the base price down by subsidizing with ads. So paying won’t prevent this, but if a product is “free” you can be pretty much certain it’ll be riddled with ads.

As much as I subscribe to this perspective, when I think about how much money must be flowing through these ecosystems, I wonder if that's the real price point?

I mean theoretically how much would you be willing to pay for search that has no advertisement.

$1000 a year?

I'm genuinely curious, what would a privacy first non-advertising based approach cost? I mean I suspect you could discount it by not tracking individual users but instead just advertise on results searched, but what does the extreme version of this cost like do you think?

What kind of money do we need to put on the table that someone serving it goes, you know what, let's just provide a great search product, if we start trying to mess around with ads / tracking, we're risking killing this golden goose?

Yeah I wonder the same, and we really don’t know. I often wonder if Facebook would be better if it didn’t rely on ads and data-mining. Would Facebook be “good”? Would Facebook even exist at this scale if people had to pay? People are so hesitant to pay even a buck for an app, it makes me question if all these massive services could’ve been possible if they weren’t “free”.

I feel like there's a world of difference between paying a buck for an app and paying for something like this, you could argue that the value delivered is so high the fee would be out of the ballpark for most to be able to pay.

But there are definitely people who are genuinely interested in paying.

Even facebook does provide me with some benefit, but less at present than Alphabet does, though maybe with Oculus that will change?

Why not go to your local library, maintainers of an ad free search index, and find out?

This isn't novel work, and is likely even cheaper than the dead tree variant. The most expensive parts are the hardware and storage costs for the index.

This is pretty interesting, would libraries even be interested in maintaining a search index?

That's like a return to yahoo directory / search index.

Or were you imagining something different?

Personally? I think you've already got steps in that direction with things like the Internet Archive, but that's subtly different because the ergonomics are more around you need to know what you're looking for to find it.

The major issue that may hold it back though, is libraries wouldn't sacrifice their current duties and role in society to do it, (which I agree with wholeheartedly). and anyone trying to host an honest search index is going to have to deal with the political baggage associated therewith. If you host for profit, you will get sued. If you did it as a research project/labor of love (from the United States), arguably, you may have grounds to tell other people's lawyers to stuff it, but there are certain interests which will spend every hour and minute they can trying to get the courts to twist your arm into preserving the integrity of their business model. The law os also fraught with precedent that makes things like pirate site listing a no-no; but it is not clear to my knowledge if that is a blanket ban on indexing, or a ban on indexing + any type of amplification while reaping financial benefit thereby.

I've contemplated doing a project in that direction a few times. I always end up waffling before I get started though. I'd totally do it, but I have a feeling I'd better get a JD first unless I essentially want a hobby project to turn into some lawyer's recreational revenue stream. It's sad it's come to that, but it is what is.

It is definitely on my list of "Stuff to do once I've built myself up a nest egg". As I truly think an index unpoisoned by commercial concerns is something the world expected, and increasingly needs. I weep for a return to a more objective picture of the Web; one where it was in a literal sense more the worlds hypertext implemented phonebook rather than a cesspool of SEO garbage, and lawsuit driven optics management/platforming tool.

It just blows, because the moment you start getting people to help stave off what operational costs are incurred, and it goes beyond donation/volunteerism, you're done. Somebody will have an in to coerce you into distorting your search index. If not on commercial interest, then on the basis that of course, "some arsehole will host CP (or other verboten content) out there, and what do when you index it?"

I may be a militant enough "info must be free" personality to undertake the journey... But I'm one person, and my interest is prone to fickleness, and I've been called an absolute madman by enough people I have the feeling that if things did get off the ground sufficiently, I am unsure whether or not I'd find someone else willing to work on keeping the thing available.

And there are few things I hate in life more than being a Single Point Of Failure.

> I wonder if that's the real price point?

Alphabet's total revenue in 2021 was about $257B. If, say, a billion users paid an average of $257 a year, that would be the same annual revenue. That doesn't seem at all unreasonable (less than $22 a month for actual services for me as a user unadulterated by ads and without privacy concerns? where do I sign up?), particularly since if they were just providing services users actually need--search, maps, gmail, etc.--and not having to add on all the extra effort of advertising, it would be cheaper for them to provide those services to users than it is now.

Ok, that's an interesting take, as an example, I know that I'd toyed on several occasions paying for youtube red except that a part of me really fundamentally doesn't trust that they'll keep to their statement that it will actually be ad free[0].

As a comparison, I've paid for Spotify for a long time primarily to get rid of ads and was entirely ok with that.

I certainly pay for dev tools on a yearly basis that cost me a similar level as $257 a year and so I feel like paying for what Alphabet offer in terms of map / video / search fits comfortably in that same bracket of cost to value that I'd be ok making that trade as well.

I don't know if I'd pay themselves Alphabet that much, primarily because like with they Youtube example, what kind of a commitment[1] could they make that makes me believe that me paying them would mean they stop treating me as a product and as a customer instead? It sort of feels like that ship sailed a long time ago, ad money is very seductive it seems.

- [0]: It also doesn't help that their recommendation engine seems to give worse recommendations over time, so a regular purge seems to be required to get back to reasonable recommendations.

- [1]: This ends up being a fun thought experiment.

> what kind of a commitment[1] could they make that makes me believe that me paying them would mean they stop treating me as a product and as a customer instead?

I'm not sure they could make a credible commitment to that at this point. I'm not sure there is any viable way for them to transition, at scale, from their current business model to one where they just charge users directly for services those users want. But the latter business model is still there, waiting, and sooner or later I think someone will find a way to use it to take Google's market.

I'd also want to maintain my own list of domains I'd want excluded from my results.

I should be able to share my 'shitlist' with other users and see the rank of my shitlist domains that are included on other's shitlist.

Open the neighbouring comment thread about YouTube Vanced and you'll see that even an average HNer thinks asking for payment is an insult to their very being.

Which is bad, because if developers (who know the work that goes into building software better than anybody else) aren’t very willing to pay, it’s hopeless to expect your average person to be willing to pay for software.

I got curious about this and wanted to spitball some numbers. According to a Google search, Google's average user "conducts 3-4 searches each day." Nobody goes into details, so we don't know if those include subsequent searches or the average number of pages they looked at -- though I think we can assume that would be pretty close to 1, as most people are going to find what they're looking for in the first few results.

Let's say the average searches per day is 4 and they are general enough queries to be showing ads, of which there are an average of 3 per page. It would be a mix of CPM and clicks, but each placement will average out to roughly $0.007 in revenue. That's 360 ads per month resulting in ~$2.50 per user.

Of course, that doesn't include the specific overhead of brokering the ads or developing and maintaining such a bizarrely complicated system, and it's safe to assume their margins are at most 20-30%. So, after expending all of that effort in creating this anti-privacy, anti-consumer, anti-competitive system that's rigged against both the advertisers and users, they're making a whopping $0.75/mo per search user.

Which is all to say that if search were simply search, then they could: charge $10/year for an ad-free and privacy-focused service, drastically simplify their entire infrastructure, reassign the ad support staff toward much-needed consumer issues, and actually be making more money in the process. However, this doesn't include Maps or other services, which is how they convert that $0.75/mo search user into a $10/mo ecosystem addict (or $1,000/mo supporter of content creators).

Search is the method for directing traffic where they want it to go, and the trick is to also be making money from all of those places, with even more profitable ads or salable products. I think any search engine will struggle with this when it inevitably grows beyond its core product, because the alternative is a mess of different companies, products, APIs and methodologies that barely work together -- moral high ground wages aren't exactly an ingredient for explosive, cohesive and industry-competitive innovation.

A couple of thoughts on this:

- You're completely discounting the overhead of running a $10/mo service, not to mention the cost of acquisition.

- Google and other free-to-use search engines aren't going away in this scenario, so this hypothetical paid search engine will need to "compete with free"

- If you're competing with free, you need to offer a better experience than the free service. Cutting the BS sounds good, but is it $10/mo better than the free service?

Finally, the biggest issue is that, with the ad model, the minimum Google earns per user is $0.75/mo, but they could make notably more off of negotiated deals for big purchases (eg: Google could sell placements against high-dollar things like real estate for more money) or could just get a windfall from high-frequency months; with your model, the maximum the business can ever earn is $10/mo.

> You're completely discounting the overhead of running a $10/mo service, not to mention the cost of acquisition.

You're entirely misreading what I said. They already have the service and that is an existing cost. To have the ads is an additional cost (and a massive one at that), which could be entirely replaced with a virtually zero-cost purchase form. That's less overhead, not equal -- and certainly not more. Also, I specifically referenced the overhead in my comment, so it's amazing that you would claim I'm disregarding it.

> Google and other free-to-use search engines aren't going away in this scenario, so this hypothetical paid search engine will need to "compete with free"

I literally used Google as an example of how they could make more money without ads, and I didn't say anything at all about them only having a paid option. Also, my conclusion was that paid can't compete with free, so you just reiterated my point in an attempt to "prove me wrong."

> If you're competing with free, you need to offer a better experience than the free service. Cutting the BS sounds good, but is it $10/mo better than the free service?

I said $10/year, not $10/mo. Is $1/mo worth it from a user perspective to remove ads and privacy invasive features? The universal answer to that for any employed individual is yes (even if they've been tricked into thinking otherwise), because all of these companies have repeatedly proven that they can't be trusted to monetize free services without acting incredibly harmful in the process.

> Finally, the biggest issue is that, with the ad model, the minimum Google earns per user is $0.75/mo, but they could make notably more off of negotiated deals for big purchases (eg: Google could sell placements against high-dollar things like real estate for more money) or could just get a windfall from high-frequency months; with your model, the maximum the business can ever earn is $10/mo.

I said that $0.75 was the average, not the minimum, and that was already based on an average of all of the higher and lower term rates. If users are contributing $0.75/mo on average via ads, then a switch to paying $1/mo averages out to more revenue. That's how averages work.

And again, my conclusion was that paid doesn't actually beat free from the amoral business perspective, so all you're doing is agreeing with me while also trying to tell me I'm wrong (based on things nobody said).

It's substantial friction. You pay for a search engine, another search engine, a documentation site, YouTube, Hacker News, 50 different newspapers...

What I want is some fixed revenue-sharing service a la YouTube Premium but for the entire Internet. Pay $XX/month, and get access to a zillion websites, with each one receiving revenue proportional to how much you use it.

Except the websites would probably game that by loading a zillion empty iframes or something. Damn.

The irony of promoting Brave in this thread.

No kidding.

This always bothers me. I won't click the "Order Online" button anymore. I'll look for the restaurants website (which often isn't the Website button either) and order directly.

If I ran a restaurant, I would never partner with these platforms directly. Let them sell your food, but don't take a loss on the sale just so they can take some profit. I doubt there's much new customer acquisition through these platforms to justify the cost.

I already do this for hotel bookings. I'm fed up with Google, Booking.com or whoever trying to trick me into paying them for zero added value.

You can’t directly book through Google, if I remember correctly. They’ll kick you out to the business’ site to do that.

They’re just an aggregator and get paid in referral fees. The value for you is in the aggregation engine.

The worst thing about hotel rates is the hotels themselves basically force you to go through a third party unless you want to pay their insane markups. You'd think they'd want you to book directly too...

They have a solid point. I've had a couple different experiences where I clicked on a restaurant on Google Maps and thought I was looking at their official menu - ordered some food and called the restaurant when it never arrived only to find out they never got the order and don't use that delivery service.

Sometimes it seems like Google think the internet is "theirs".

either they truly have lost touch with their userbase or the large majority of users simply do not care. in any case i'd love to use DDG but the results simply isn't good and I always end up coming back to google. just wish we could give them less information.

but seems they are anti-competitive, youtube vanced is another recent example.

Try Kagi. Free in beta, paid-for in due course, but excellent results.

I hate to say it, but I can't stick with DDG. It's bad enough for my uses, that I have to constantly switch back to google.

I know mileage may vary for others.

same situation, although I recall, there is another search engine that anonymizes your google search....just can't recall what it's called

It's called startpage.

yes!

weird thing after I installed it, google chrome immediately used a dark pattern to get me to disable it. if I had been a below user average, i would've given up!

DDG has also announced that their search results would be affected by their political biases.

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

At least the other way around is true sometimes, that the internet thinks Google's search results are theirs.

The Internet is theirs. When will we take it back?

The merchant is able to set something on that page, the one with the ordering options, that would label their own website "Preferred by business". If you ever see it, it's fairly prominent. To me this almost totally invalidates the basis for the lawsuit.

As an example look up Emmy Squared Pizza: East Village in NYC.

'restaurants can choose to opt out of our fraud after we force set up a fake store front' is hardly an argument against a lawsuit

If any one has model (draft) legislation to prohibit misc hijacking strategies, please share.

I've chatted with my local reps (city & state), who sounded supportive. Figuring out some kind of policy proposal is on my To Do list.

It's easy to think of ways this backfires if written too broadly. Such as the record label claiming the local record shop is hijacking their search results and stealing their sales, they want them delisted so searches always go to the record label's online store.

> It's easy to think of ways this backfires if written too broadly.

That can (and often is, with unproductive outcomes) be said about everything.

Yes, and that's why politics is hard.

I guess it's about https://orderfood.google.com/ (US only, VPN works) + links in organic search results.

> When users click the “Order Online” button, they’re directed to a page that in many cases contains large links to food delivery companies, complete with their logos. The restaurant’s own site gets a link as well, though it’s a small, generic “website” button. In some cases, Google provides an interface for assembling an order, complete with prices and descriptions of the menu items.

> “Google’s ‘Order Online’ button leads to an unauthorized online storefront—one owned and controlled by Google—wherein consumers can place orders for the restaurant’s products, all under the restaurant’s tradename,” the lawsuit says. “Google prominently features the restaurant’s tradename at the top of the page, above the restaurant’s address and menu, to give the user the distinct impression that the storefront and products are authorized and sponsored by the restaurant, when they are not.”

I'm not sure if "business fraud" is a thing, but it seems to me like it should be illegal for any business to offer any services on behalf of another business without permission. It's fine if Google displays what it thinks a restaurant's menu is, so long as they aren't pretending to be the restaurant. But taking orders and payment on behalf of another business without their permission is wrong - and using the other business's branding like that is especially twisted.

I'm really confused by this complaint.

If I hit a restaurant's order button I get taken to food.google.com where I am asked to pick a platform to order on, which includes doordash, grubhub, or the restaurants own website (if available). Perhaps if only one of the platforms were available, it would direct me to that provider? (the examples I've tried have all had multiple options).

I'm certainly am not seeing this Google controlled storefront thing from the complaint, unless they are claiming the Provider selection screen is a storefront.

I haven't seen a case yet where the branding is that deceptive. I would like to see it, I'm open to believing it exists.

So far, in the examples I've looked at, it has been fairly clear who the players are. I liken it to seeing the logos for car manufacturers on a car rental company's website. I know I'm not entering directly into a transaction with Toyota. I understand that if I search "rent Toyota" on Google a lot of third party services are going to come up in the results.

How is it not fraud to put in a search term, and have the result NOT be what you searched for, but a paid for middleman site that is making money off the situation.

This makes google a shill at best.

The middleman is either charging the searcher more to eat at the restaurant, or the restaurant is getting less compensation.

Seems pretty evil to me.

While this isn't directly Google's doing, they do enable it for other services too: when I was on a road trip, I realized that I was going to need one additional hotel stay before getting home, so at 1 AM I was shopping around for a hotel on my phone and found a place that looked decent enough. I looked up their web page to get their phone number (since I don't trust the Google side-bar) to call them and everything seemed normal enough.

I clarified what their pet policy was over the phone and they said I was fine to bring the pets I needed to bring. They said that bringing a large dog and a cat was fine, so I thought everything was good. When I got there, the person handling check-in complained that I was violating hotel policy, as they only allowed one pet and only small dogs were allowed. I was confused as I had specifically asked when booking if they would be allowed and I was assured that it was fine. Thankfully we were allowed to keep the reservation given that we were keeping the animals crated while in the room.

When I got home, I compared the phone number in my dial history to the one on the hotel's website, and I noticed that they were different. After a lot of confusion, I tried replicating my steps to navigate to the hotel's website on my phone and realized that I had actually clicked on an "Ad" link on Google to get to the website, rather than the organic result. The webpages were almost identical, with the only difference being the phone number. Presumably the "Ad" link was put up by a booking site to funnel phone traffic away from the legitimate site.

Presumably because I was tired, I either didn't notice it was an ad, or I figured that it would be equivalent to the organic search result, but it could have potentially caused me to have to find a hotel that accepts big dogs with vacancy at 11 PM in a city I don't know, in addition to wasting my money since the reservations weren't refundable at that point.

tl;dr: Booking sites use Google ads to steal organic traffic intended to go directly to hotels and caused me to unintentionally violate a hotel's pet policy

Yet another example of the misleading attempts to capture business inquiries by intermediaries. This has long been the case in the hospitality industry, where third party bookers make their ads look so deceptively like you're going to the actual hotel website that I have trouble sorting them out, despite considerable knowledge of their tricks. Ditto insurance - you can't find clean links to Medicare services, or actual ACA insurance exchanges half the time, for the blizzard of brokers' links/ads that appear high in the search results.

This is only partly Google's fault though - it's the brokers and other re-intermediaries really fueling it. They ought to be sanctioned along with Google.

Sounds like usual Google 'organizing the world's information' getting it in trouble again. I mean they're just organizing the links that were scattered across sites and services and SERPs to doordash, ubereats, etc. Seems like the restaurant has a problem with those delivery services more.

I've sometimes wanted to order food ahead of time at local restaurants and pick it up but when I see a poorly branded ordering form on a web site with a generic domain name I've got little faith my order is going to be processed at all, never mind correctly.

(... even if it is on the up-and-up there is still the concern that the restaurant doesn't have good processes in place to handle online orders. Years ago I tried online ordering from a local sub shop which handled in-store orders so well one could imagine it being the subject of a business school case study and they screwed up my online order because it didn't fit in their process.)

It may really be the restaurant that contracts with some web site to put up an ordering form, maybe the whole thing is a scam. Either way I just don't do it unless I really know online ordering is effective.

Isn’t this standard pattern all over the industry? Companies essentially hijack the place’s online presence and force a deal with them. That is how all the delivery services boost their signup numbers.

Break 'em up. Search, at the very least, needs to be spun off. The problem is that they are too useful as a conglomerate (with their tentacles in everything) for the government to break them up.

Does Google want to win this? I mean if this is legal what is stopping me to put a front-end before Google and adding my own value add aka. stripping ads?

> I mean if this is legal what is stopping me to put a front-end before Google and adding my own value add aka. stripping ads?

Google Chrome? I mean they are literally releasing a new version of their browsers plugin API just to break all the ad blockers and privacy plugins. They will probably also find a way to mark your page as malicious (links to all those malware sites,..) or do one of hundreds of other things that will make people avoid your website. They basically own the client, legality only enters the picture when they have to pay a significant amount of fines.

It's annoying when search engines rank third parties above the actual restaurant. I ran into this today.

this is disappointing to learn about, i have ordered through these options before, usually for in store pickup so its unfortunate that i'm still using these predatory services that i've been working to avoid

After reading the entire article, the picture has become a bit clearer.

Just to recap the ups and downs of the wishy-washy language these corporate bottomfeeders are using:

>We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature.

So gogle states that they made this without any intention of compensation.

>While The Ordering App was initially set up to take a percentage of sales,

Okay, no. So they have* received compensation for this, but intend to never receive profit in the future?

>gogle waived it “to help support restaurants affected during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Again, no. So they were* charging, and were collecting exactly the fees they said they weren't, but now they've stopped... "'cuz covid or whatever. See how loving and giving your global overlord is treating its filthy, disgusting peasants? :^)"

Basically, gogle waived the fee because they can afford to - for now - and want customers to get accustomed to using it before* they start charging for it (again) after it's reached some predefined metric. How gracious of them to deceive us with such carefully crafted lies.

>Companies that have completed the “Order Online” setup with gogle can also direct customers to their own online ordering services.

Okay, so this only* impacts companies that want to participate in this stupid online ordering setup?

>If restaurants haven’t completed the setup, gogle appears to create a page anyway...

Okay, so no. This isn't just people who want to participate. Whether or not a restaurant has any* interest whatsoever in a listing on gogle, their (potential) customers will be given the impression that the restaurant has an online ordering feature.

>...It’s unclear how that happens, though it’s possible that a restaurant’s appearance in a delivery app is what triggers it.

So, presumably, NO ONE at gogle knows how or why this happens, or at least, no one is unwilling to say how or why this happens because they're whorish enough to keep their scummy mouths shut. So, whether or not a restaurant has ANY intention of working with 3rd parties, those 3rd parties will still try to profit off of restaurants hard work, and potentially drive away business by the higher charges associated with online ordering...

>If the restaurant has a relationship with the food delivery company, it gets charged a fee. These fees can be so high—15 to 30 percent in many cases—that the restaurant has no hope of making a profit from the order.

...and if the restaurant actively participates in asinine online ordering, the only thing they can possibly gain out of it is...

> “Rather, a restaurant’s usual goal is to capture new customers that may later place orders with the restaurant outside of the Delivery Providers’ expensive platforms.”

...blind hope that, after a customer gets accustomed to purchasing through a very specific means, that suddenly without warning, the customer will then completely change methods into paying a completely different way (in-person, over the phone, etc.)

And ultimately, whether or not they play ball with that 3rd party parasite, they're still being listed on that stupid 3rd party website, which in turn is pimping them out to daddy g*ogle for a taste of exposure, which benefits all parties. Except for the restaurant or customer.

Yeah, I can see why this resulted in a lawsuit.

> On those pages, customers are prompted with large buttons to order with food delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, or Seamless.

Olo can help restaurants get themselves on Google Food Ordering, and help them create their own online ordering systems, so you can get ahead of the hijackers.

It's Google's fault that the owners of these restaurants don't know how to use Excel?

It is Google's fault that they are forcing an elderly Thai couple, who have owned a restaurant in Wrigleyville for 20 years, to spend extra time and effort to figure out how to protect their meager profits from internet-based poachers.

That's an appeal to emotion, not a rational argument.

Restaurant owners should know the maximum fee that the delivery apps are charging (since they are signing the contract) and adjust prices accordingly. If they are "an elderly Thai couple" (because as we know old people and Thais are idiots) that has managed to reach old age without bankrupting their restaurant, surely they can calculate the impact of the fees of the contracts that they sign on their business.

How about this then? Many restaurant owners, including the ones I mentioned, are unaware of the existence of these unofficial ordering channels (websites, phone numbers). They claim that they did not sign up for any of this.

My wife recently was tricked into calling one of these fake numbers on a fake, but official-looking restaurant website. The person on the other end pretended to be the restaurant that we wanted to order from. But my wife grew suspicious when the person knew nothing about the menu.

You keep talking about contracts. But simply saying that 'you signed a contract' does not make it true.

Are you saying that these restaurants are selling food at 30% discount without even knowing what they are doing? That makes absolutely no sense.

To deny the impact of emotional circumstance on decisionmaking is itself highly irrational.

What are you saying learning Excel would solve for the owners? (honest question)

Indeed, owners should instruct staff to ask the ones picking up the order what they paid, and write it down.

The unaffiliated ponies picking up the order are paying the restaurant whatever the restaurant is charging.

Google isn't even in restaurants business and they are already defrauding the restaurants. No wonder people hate Google and love Amazon. Amazon has been doing business with small business and has never taken advantage of them. Meanwhile Google is siphoning money from small restaurants during the pandemic.

> Amazon has been doing business with small business and has never taken advantage of them.

Oh, wow. I think the countless small businesses that have been essentially forced out by AmazonBasics would disagree with you.

While it is still under contention, see recent news surrounding the Amazon Basics brands.

At the end of the day do these restaurants not cook and sell the food, or is Google running a secret shadow kitchen and swapping out the cuisine too?

If you put a service on the Internet (restaurant website, or making order pickup available from food delivery service), it's going to be consumed. You really have no right to complain about how - Firefox, text based browser, screen reader, printed and physically mailed, or wrapped in another website. Interoperability is a beautiful thing, and if anything, should be made more legal.

Your restaurant website probably isn't accessible either. At least Google's is.

No one's asserting they're swapping out the food.

I'd bet it's more on the "trademark violation" end of things.

> No one's asserting they're swapping out the food.

With the amount of vitriol in this thread one wouldn't have been blamed for thinking they were, is my point. We call ourselves Hackers and we're mad about this?

Yes, I'd be mad if someone was using the name of my business to siphon off 30% of my revenue.

To be charged a 30% fee, is part of the business agreement that the restaurant voluntarily entered with that food delivery company though?? I'm gonna leave this thread now, complaining about this is just nuts...

> The restaurant voluntarily entered a relationship with that food delivery company though??

In many cases, no.

https://www.eater.com/21537215/restaurants-sue-third-party-d...

> Grubhub has explicitly made this false partnership part of their business strategy. Last October, CEO Matt Maloney said the company would be piloting a new initiative of adding more restaurants to its searchable database without entering into an official partnership with them, so customers would believe they had more delivery options with Grubhub, and wouldn’t switch to competitors.

Re: your edit...

> To be charged a 30% fee...

If you don't have a deal with them, they can raise prices to get their cut. Shitty customer experience; they'll likely blame the restaurant for gouging them. Same if they list items not available from an old menu; restaurant gets blamed.

There are some funny arbitrage opportunities with the non-consensual listings: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

More restaurants to the database but that doesn't mean those restaurants are paying the fee. Likely loss leaders for GrubHub.

The listing fee mentioned in this Ars article says it is only if you have a relationship, which makes sense.

> If the restaurant has a relationship with the food delivery company, it gets charged a fee.

> Likely loss leaders for GrubHub.

Using someone else's trademark for your business in this fashion is still likely a trademark violation, even if you're losing money on it.

Does this same logic apply to something like Visa concierge service (or other procurement company), where they show you the brand item and store logo from where it comes, and then go buy it for you? Why can they do that, but not Google?

I think there's a significant distinction between "I'd like to order food from restaurant X, I'll Google them" versus a concierge service. I can't speak for Visa's, but Amex's has never been misleading in this sort of fashion.

The restaurants don't want people thinking their prices are 30% higher than they actually are. When Grubhub adds restaurants without permission they raise prices and often list items that aren't on the menu. Consumers order and blame the restaurant when things aren't perfect. You can see why the restaurant would be mad?

I think this is the grey area. I don't see any inherent problem with any of

* hiring someone to place an order at a restaurant for you and deliver it.

* that service adjusting the consumer facing prices for individual items since they're really getting food from the delivery service and the restaurant is just a supplier.

* that service using the name, logo, and menu of the restaurant for the purposes of advertising that they can deliver there. Lots of businesses will be like "we buy $this_part from $here -- here's your options."

* the delivery service having no business relationship with the delivery provider.

If you're gonna fix anything it would be requiring that it's clear that you're not ordering direct from the restaurant and the delivery service takes all the responsibility but that's pretty minor.

The tech world equivalent is upstream maintainers getting bug reports from downstream distro builds of their software and we're normally not like "we must regulate that Debian has a business relationship with all OSS they package."

If true, what is this authenticity of origin discussion all about, after all? Why is Google promoting https in the search ranking? Why should users know with whom they are interacting with on a contract level?

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