CBS “60 Minutes” piece on Google’s abuse of dominance

Yelp is crying sour grapes here.<p>There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there?<p>They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad.<p>They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes.<p>Following up on the last idea They could have tried to auto cluster reviewers. (people who rated these 5 places as having good taste also liked ...)<p>the could have scanned menus so you could ask &quot;where can I get a pepperoni pizza at 3am&quot; instead of at best being able to look up &quot;pizza&quot; and figure the rest out yourself.<p>How about &quot;where can I get a table for 10&quot;. How about partner with as many restaurants as possible so I can ask &quot;who&#x27;s still got a table for 4 for steak and win between 7 and 9pm tonight&quot;<p>And maybe nothing would save them but I at least for me reviews make sense on Google maps. That yelp couldn&#x27;t see their audience was going to dry up seems no different than newspaper classifieds and Craigslist. Their quality certainly isn&#x27;t better so ATM there is zero reason to go there.

CBS interview leaves out critical details. Initially, Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn&#x27;t liked that and demanded to remove all snippets. Google said it had right to show snippets like any other websites and if Yelp says their content is &quot;private&quot; then Google shouldn&#x27;t be crawling them at all. That&#x27;s what they did. This caused Yelp to disappear from Google and their traffic tanked. So after this some deal was reached. Eventually, Google just decided to do their own reviews and started showing them in Google Maps. Yelp then started this PR war that is now going on for years.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there. I hate Yelp. They are greedy bastards who have cornered up huge content entirely contributed by volunteers. They are the ones wanting to monopolize market in this area and avoid having Google as player here. They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers. Yelp reviews and ratings should be free and in open domain by vary nature of how it was created (and so should be Amazon&#x27;s review - but at least they are not entirely volunteers driven website). On the top of this, Yelp has remained mostly stagnant waiting for their big payout day. I don&#x27;t consider them good for users or internet or industry. So for me this is pick between the worse evil.<p>The debate is so very similar to IE on Windows, however. Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape? Should they be prevented from putting their integrated polished experience in front and center that benefits the customers? One can say that suing Microsoft actually worked out best overall for industry. I&#x27;m not too sure how alternate world would have looked like. History certainly rhymes here.<p>[1] You can say whatever about IE&#x27;s lack of implementing proper standards but it was the fastest browser in its day. It was truly free no strings attached (as long as you are on Windows) and it advanced many things, for example, it was the first browser to implement CSS, XML parsing and tons of functionality that is now part of HTML5 standards.

When I want to buy something, I type &quot;amazon.com&quot;, not &quot;google.com&quot;.<p>So, why don&#x27;t I type &quot;yelp.com&quot;, when I want to go somewhere?<p>There is nothing to complain about, when your product sucks.

It honestly sounds like Yelp is just salty at the fact that their SEO marketing isn&#x27;t as effective as it used to be because of Google&#x27;s improvement to their search engine algorithms.<p>Also, it&#x27;s laughable that of all companies, Yelp is the one complaining about Google.

60 Minutes didn&#x27;t reveal anything here a lot of us don&#x27;t already know, there wasn&#x27;t any hard-hitting journalism or incredible revelations. But given 60 Minutes reaches millions of people, it&#x27;s probably massively raised awareness of these issues with a significant number of people who don&#x27;t generally follow tech explicitly.

I have run several local marketplaces and what Google is doing to local search is so anti-competitive that many people have decided not to start new local marketplaces. You can Imagine what that does to innovation. In the medium term it will hurt Google. It takes years to build trust and it erodes slowly over time until one day it&#x27;s gone.

Yelp is not that innocent either, their &quot;practices&quot; are just as questionable, if not more questionable, than Google&#x27;s.

Mainstream media story about web company? Check. Nothing new? Check. Negative? Check. Of course Yelp participated...but Yelp angle aside, CBS is just following the news cycle patterns of their brethren. I&#x27;m mentioning this a lot these days, but feels like watching cattle being herded (albeit willingly).

Google recently started showing job postings in their search results (at least here in Canada). I suppose this will affect indeed.com, monster.com, and a site I had stake in. I love monetizing niche search engines and other data products, but it looks like Google will eventually get into any industry where the main source of traffic is organic search, I wonder what is next.

In the US, Yelp was the go-to for reviews.<p>But that&#x27;s not the case in other markets. Travel to Australia, and you&#x27;ll find that basically the only reviews are from Americans. All the Australians use Google.<p>Which makes Yelp in Australia GREAT for Americans. A feature I wish they would build out officially. I like seeing how other people like me rate things. When someone says, &quot;The pizza ain&#x27;t like home.&quot; I know to trust that person if they&#x27;re from NY. Or, how the Texans ranked local brisket, how people who spoke German rated the schnitzel, or how people from states that grow apples rank apple pie. A million other examples. Profoundly useful for finding good reviews.<p>Anyway neither Google or Yelp offer this feature, and it seems so fundamentally easy to build out. Just aggregate reviews by reviewer meta-data, no? Or something as simple as, &quot;Show me where people who rated this place a 5 also ate.&quot; Mix in &quot;check-ins&quot; (and tie those to discount tiers, since Yelp can) and you can start seeing, &quot;Show me places where people rate 5, and actually return regularly...&quot; This stuff makes for powerful reviews. You don&#x27;t need first names, you don&#x27;t need to worry about fake reviewers... they have my credit card linked to them, and if that serves as a reward system... anyway Google and Yelp are both missing the boat on a lot of this stuff.<p>I really despise how they both make me use a &quot;real&quot; name now. No way I want friends and family seeing what I write. If a place sucks, I want to be free to trash it without fear of someone saying, &quot;Hey {person with a fairly unique first name who is fairly well-known in a relatively small community}, why did you trash my pizza?&quot; or, &quot;Hey Mr. Regular, why haven&#x27;t you written me a review yet?&quot; or, &quot;Hey Grandson, I see that you&#x27;re reviewing the same BDSM shop your grandfather and I love!&quot; Ha. Having real IDs on the web... creepy as fuck.

The whole piece looks &amp; feels like a documentary that could have been aired during the Dotcom bubble. Looking forward to watching this in twenty years from now.

Hasn&#x27;t Yelp forced businesses to pay or else they&#x27;ll showcase the negative reviews more than the positive ones? Pot calling the kettle black when it comes to abusing dominance.

Yelp has a point. Google, and largely Larry Page&#x27;s insistence on shortening the time between query and answer is starting to stumble under the reality that the source data Google utilizes for its own services isn&#x27;t the best there is as Yelp rightly laid out. It may be wise for Google to back off on some touchy verticals or to integrate 3rd party data sources to stymie any attempts by regulators to flex. This is the perfect populist opportunity for any public official to run on. Maybe this will take some of the heat off of Amazon for a minute.

I get calls from yelp sales which I would call nothing short of predatory, to the point where I literally put on my website a notice to yelp staff to stop calling me.

Actually, a huge mistake yelp made is forced you in their app. Very very anti user.

Using Duck Duck Go, nearly all my top search results are Yelp, and that is at times enough to make me use Google. (Yes, for every search I could type -yelp but that gets painful.) It&#x27;s clear that the way Yelp indexes, that Google is doing something to push it down. The question is whether that is purely to squash their competition, or because people don&#x27;t actually want Yelp results. I&#x27;m not suggesting the former is not the case.

I use Yelp all the time. I’ve never even considered using Google maps as a replacement for Yelp.<p>But I just tried it and you know what? I think I might switch. I just did a search for “lunch” from my house, and it came up with all my favorite places. (I know this could be because it’s using what it knows about my location data to suggest places I’ve been to frequently, which is why I’m not totally sold yet).<p>I’ll try using both for a while and see how it goes.

This is ironic. Yelps complaint about Google, is the same I have heard from a few small business owners I have worked with.<p>One customer had over 50% of their legitimate reviews that they worked so incredibly hard for, gone in one day. In trying to appeal, Yelps canned response was its due to our algorithm and there isn’t anything we can do. My customer was in tears over this issue.

i thought it was pretty funny during their demonstration of how bad google was, they googled &quot;san francisco restaurants&quot; (or something like that), and there on the auto-complete was &quot;san francisco restaurants YELP&quot;, like, dude, this website that is so evil is advertising for you, right there, in the box where you&#x27;re typing!

Using Google Cache now since the site is down...

Google reviews can’t be trusted either. Google reviews can be removed, I worked for a company that would work to remove all the bad reviews by real clients then pay people overseas to leave 5 star reviews.

They have a point but this really is the best example of the pot calling the kettle black that I&#x27;m aware of. Yelp <i>and</i> Google both abuse their dominance.

Search results are become a google product. Just as restaurants have turn into yelp products.<p>I can&#x27;t say it was all their secret goal from the beginning, but it now is.

I didn&#x27;t see the majority of the piece because the kids were acting up, but I must be missing something. Why is this a big deal when it&#x27;s the SAME company&#x27;s browser that the user is using that is showing products&#x2F;services at the top for the SAME company&#x27;s products?<p>Why can&#x27;t google have their own products&#x27;&#x2F;services&#x27; links at the top of all search results?

I didn&#x27;t read the post but the idea of yelp complaining about abuse is pretty funny.

I use Google all day long. I start there for pretty much everything.<p>Looking for a product I start on Google and usually end up buying on Amazon.com. Amazon is Google&#x27;s chief competitor yet it is one of the first couple links that come back.<p>Reason?<p>Because Amazon offers a great product and is popular and therefore high on the list returned.<p>Versus Yelp is awful and not high on the list. Google search is working how it should.<p>Yelp create a better product like Amazon and you get high on the list.<p>But how in the world did this story even get on 60 minutes? Does Yelp know someone at CBS?

Do a search for a product and Amazon is #1 or #2 result and chief competitor of Google and will not allow Google products to be sold by anyone on their market place.<p>This entire thing is ridiculous. Google is obviously not gaming results.<p>Yelp sucks so lower down. Make it better and be higher like Amazon.

The problem is not Google. The problem is that the government is unable to get his head around an internet based monopoly. Google shouldnt be allowed to host more than 50% of searches by law.<p>In any other industry enjoying a monopoly position in search as google has enjoyed all these years would have reason enough to break it up into smaller pieces.