I find all this hand wringing over Google to be so tiring. Google is doing what is best for it's customers. Be that advertisers and/or searchers.<p>If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance.<p>Last I checked, nobody is forced to use google to search for things, nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome.<p>I'm not a laissez-faire capitalist by any means, but I don't see that Google has an unfair monopoly. They have achieved their dominance because their services are viewed as "best" by the majority of folks out there.<p>Nobody complains when Google suddenly starts delivering more customers to their web properties, only if traffic suddenly dies out.
"Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time."<p>That sums it up for Yelp and many others, myself included. Combine that reality with the black box that Google is, in many ways, and you have an inaccessible behemoth who's decisions decide the fate of many.<p>Googles combination of Search, Browser, and Advertising dominance gives it a unique position of power. Then there are secondary markets like Android that just buttress their position.<p>I see the fight raging about net neutrality and keep thinking that Google neutrality is just as important. It affects people in even more meaningful ways, determining where they go and what they see on the Internet.
I found that Yelp's reviews very unreliable. My business owner friends told me that they are constantly harassed by yelp's sales representatives to buy the right to "clean up" their reviews. I don't see how yelp can continue trash their brand like this and blaming Google for their low performance.
Summary: a scummy company like Yelp pays to influence regulators in order to force one of their competitors to change their product to be less consumer friendly and to better feature Yelp.
2 cents here:<p>My background: I co-founded the largest online dating site in the Netherlands (sold to Match) as well as the largest housing platform (15 years before Airbnb :-). We leveraged the rise of Google to our advantage and the brands are still #1 in the Netherlands.<p>===<p>Aside: Google raised the bar for the Internet. Heck, for the world. I think their offering is orders of magnitude better than the Excite, Lycos and AltaVista days, and the no-nonsense UI allows for a purer form if of information consumption.<p>A day without Facebook is a productive day.
A day without Google is a day lost.<p>Where Google is like water to the Internet, Facebook is like a sugary softdrink. Enticing, but unhealthy with no nutritional content.<p>===<p>Google is the de-facto search on the Internet. This is reflected in their valuation, as well as the fact that to "google" something is now a verb written in lowercase.<p>As a result, Google is the lens through which the world finds its information.<p>Being in this position also implies that Google should be regulated to block advertisers (and Google) from using third party trademarks as keywords:<p>It has irked me for many years that Google can sell advertising to companies for keywords that are trademarks this advertiser does not own. E.g. Adidas showing up when searching for Nike. It's nothing short of extortion that I would be forced to bid up bidding on _my own trademark_.<p>Here is Google's policy:
<a href="https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en</a><p>It seems a trivial matter to me to query the USPTO and the EU database to make sure that any AdWords show up <i>below</i> the organic search results for the valid trademark owner (as verified inside AdWords).<p>In this case, Yelp is a trademark, and Google's own product should show up _below_ Yelp's trademark. Otherwise, I don't see how this could be interpreted other than abuse of market monopoly.
Interestingly, the other firms cited in the article as taking up the Google fight are Microsoft and Oracle, which both have had their antitrust issues.<p>This definitely looks like a case of "well, we got in trouble for this, so they should get their come-upings too!".
It doesn't get much more despicable than Yelp. They've been threatening and extorting small businesses for years. There's an upcoming documentary film that exposes them for who they truly are.<p>>Billion Dollar Bully is an investigative documentary that examines allegations against Yelp regarding extortion, review manipulation, and review fabrication.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs</a>
Unrelated but related, what is it like to work at Yelp?<p>I was recently contacted by them for a position but it didn't inspire confidence. The mention of a "shoestring operation" in this article is making me believe I made the right choice.
What I find troubling about Yelp's arguments and the antitrust situation is that these parties are basically telling a company what its website must look like and have.<p>They are saying that a website must conform to their idea of a search page which contains only plain text search results.
The problem is that there's Google the search engine and Google the answer engine. They should split off the answer engine part into something completely new, based on Google search results but with the decoration they like to add and they think is the reason people love to use Google. Including integration into your mail, private thoughts, everything. Give that to the people who love it. Integrate it with Android and some kind of voice device in your living room. Experience this and that.<p>Google.com should go back to a search box, two buttons, three ads and ten results per page. No content mix, just pure results. Honest search, only external results. No abuse of monopoly.
The thing with Yelp is that the negative reviews usually have a grain a truth to them.<p>I think they should pivot into an Internet complaints department.
yelp and tripadvisor basically destroyed the usage of "site:.XX" on google. Now every time I want to look for information on a specific country, I have to skip the first 2-4 results because they are almost "spam"
Indeed, Google is too big and has a massive effect on the Internet across the whole world. A single capricious decision made by Google/Alphabet can cause dozens of businesses to shutter or fail. And that is a big problem, especially if we care about upstarts and new companies.<p>However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".<p>The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.<p>Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.<p>(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )