High-Profile Study Turns Up the Antitrust Heat on Google
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That's a fun fact.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp#Alleged_manipulation_by_Y...
I do feel as uncomfortable about this as you do. This sort of sponsoring ruins academic objectivity.
Larger studies? No problem, the dean has you covered. The brilliance of b-schools is that they can mint $ with certificates and exec Ed, all of which is available to them at low overhead (namely the university collects a lesser cut).
It's preposterous to believe that faculty at the very top need to whore themselves out to industry for funding. What they will do to get their hands on data, however, is unspeakable. Yelp, Dropbox, eBay, etc. are merely providing data to the researchers, and more often than not, they have a say on what gets published. The truth always does eventually come out (e.g. negative company information) but it does so behind conference/seminar doors, not in print.
The logic is sound. Yelp doesn't need to be complicit in it to disagree with it. Nor frankly should they. It's a dumb feature that actually makes Google less functional.
They didn't remove ads. They removed knowledge graph data. Knowledge graph results aren't paid placement they are a collection of facts that Google has discovered through various sources, much like organic search results.
In this case the facts come from Google+ reviews. Google is just as likely to display Yelp reviews if they were able to collect that data. Yelp however doesn't supply it.
I'm pretty sure arguing for this kind of solution would be silly if Google were to, say, also require payment. I wonder, is this really so much different without money changing hands? Why is it Yelp's responsibility to provide Google access to their data in order to get a fair playground in "Search"? The same Google, by the way, which offers a directly competing product "Locale"?
It's a pay-to-play model, just without any money in order to seem innocent. Except everyone knows that data is Google's real currency, so that whole innocence goes out the window and the true cost to pay-to-play is revealed. I think Yelp is exactly right to want to protect their data from Google, and I think they're right in fighting this.
You're asking why it's a site's responsibility to ensure a search engine can index them in order for them to appear in the index. Your question presupposes that no information is required for Yelp to be featured in results. This is fallacious.
> I think Yelp is exactly right to want to protect their data from Google, and I think they're right in fighting this.
That is not what Yelp is fighting for. They want Google to link to their site, but without scraping any data. Such a thing would obviously have to be a manual edit to the ranking database and I can't believe you'd want that.
> In this case the facts [for "knowledge graph"] come from Google+ reviews. Google is just as likely to display Yelp reviews if they were able to collect that data. Yelp however doesn't supply it.
This statement is implying that Yelp should be supplying their data to Google in order to be included in the "knowledge graph". That is what I was responding to. And I think Yelp has a pretty compelling case of refusing to open their data to a competitor.
Apologies. I corrected my comment to reflect this.
> Yelp is currently refusing to open their data, but they cannot both do that and demand Google artificially rank them highly in the results.
I wasn't under the impression that anyone was debating the "organic" search results at all. I was under the impression that this is regarding the sections Google places above the search results which emphasize its own services unrelated to Search over competitors.
This paper uses a disingenuous comparison of the Maps Search section of Google's results with one augmented with Yelp feedback. What is shown is that more users will click the links when they have higher reviews.
However. Yelp flat out refuses to provide this information, and in fact if they were to be added to the results they couldn't feature in this section.
This 'logic' is then used to say it is illegal for Google to provide any more specific but still search based media on their page unless every single third party provider of similar search services consents to being included on the listings.
It's pure FUD.
But what they are actually comparing it with is a made up results page where they replace Google's knowledge graph reviews which come from Google+, with reviews that come from Yelp. Obviously there are far more Yelp reviews than Google+, so people thing that page is better. But that totally ignores the fact that Yelp reviews are not trustworthy.
Edit: Here is the (very blurry) comparison: http://i.imgur.com/PMnSt0m.jpg
Notice that it doesn't mention that the reviews on the left are from Yelp.
How are they any less trustworthy than Google+ reviews?
I have no evidence to support this, but it has been corroborated by people you can easily search for.
So Google is hurting competitors by degrading its own product (if you believe this study commissioned by a competitor). This sounds to me like a situation that is perfectly self limiting and self correcting.
While it's clear they're giving preference to their own content, it's a shaky argument since I know I can go to multiple other search engines and compare results.
You have a harder time convincing me as well since this is not like the Walmart in BFE North Dakota where people have to drive an hour before they can find another competitor - it's the internet. A few clicks here, a few clicks there, and you have plenty of other options.
Sorry, but you can't call it a monopoly if people are just too lazy to find another search engine to compare results with.
Not to mention flat out bugs
http://techsuxor.blogspot.jp/2011/05/google-weather-on-mobil...
This sort of behaviour is very similar to what got Microsoft in so much trouble. Going from one market "search engine" to another "reviews". Normally adding features like this would be fine but because Google is so powerful as to make/break web businesses it can easily be seen as anticompetitive.
>A previously undisclosed report by staffers at the Federal Trade Commission reveals new details about how Google Inc. manipulated search results to favor its own services over rivals’, even when they weren’t most relevant for users.
>In a lengthy investigation, staffers in the FTC’s bureau of competition found evidence that Google boosted its own services for shopping, travel and local businesses by altering its ranking criteria and “scraping” content from other sites. It also deliberately demoted rivals.
>For example, the FTC staff noted that Google presented results from its flight-search tool ahead of other travel sites, even though Google offered fewer flight options. Google’s shopping results were ranked above rival comparison-shopping engines, even though users didn’t click on them at the same rate, the staff found. Many of the ways Google boosted its own results have not been previously disclosed.
>One way Google favored its own results was to change its ranking criteria. Google typically ranks sites based on measures like the number of links that point to a site, or how often users click on the site in search results.
>But Marissa Mayer, who was then a Google vice president, said Google didn’t use click-through rates to determine the ranking for its own specialized-search sites, because they would rank too low, according to the staff report
>Instead, Google would “automatically boost” its own sites for certain specialized searches that otherwise would favor rivals, the FTC found. If a comparison-shopping site was supposed to rank highly, Google Product Search was placed above it. When Yelp was deemed relevant to a user’s search query, Google Local would pop up on top of the results page, the staff wrote.
>Other regulators have found similar practices. European antitrust authorities in 2013 said Google had a different, “specialized” search algorithm for ranking its own content.
>To bolster its own listings, Google sometimes copied, or “scraped,” information from rival sites. According to the FTC report, Google copied Amazon’s rankings of how well products were selling, then used that information to rank its results for product searches. Amazon declined to comment.
>While Google promoted its own results, it sometimes demoted rivals, the FTC staff found. For example, Google compiled a list of comparison-shopping sites and “demoted them from the top 10 web results,” staff wrote. According to the report, Google users in tests didn’t like the changes; only after Google tweaked its search algorithm at least four times, and changed the ranking criteria, did the new results get “slightly positive” feedback, the staff said.
>Google’s efforts paid off, the FTC found. It said Google’s maneuvers reduced Web traffic to rivals, and increased traffic to Google sites.
Because the result pages explicitly use other Google properties. Google themselves say this and claim it gives better customer experience.