4 ms·

It honestly sounds like Yelp is just salty at the fact that their SEO marketing isn't as effective as it used to be because of Google's improvement to their sea

It honestly sounds like Yelp is just salty at the fact that their SEO marketing isn't as effective as it used to be because of Google's improvement to their search engine algorithms. Also, it's laughable that of all companies, Yelp is the one complaining about Google.

annexrichmond 8y ago
TripAdvisor is also not happy: https://www.recode.net/2016/8/6/12393586/google-yelp-tripadvisor-must-try-search-results https://www.recode.net/2016/8/6/12393586/google-yelp-tripadv...
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>because of Google's improvement to their search engine algorithms. "Improvement": Post Google's own offering first and also fill page with ads to keep users within Google's own sites.
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  It might just be my opinion, but I find the user experience to be far better now that I can search for food basically directly on Google Maps. Yelp's UI is pretty janky, especially when I always end up just pasting the address I find on Yelp back into Google Maps at the end of the day so I can drive to the place.
adventured 8y ago
It's pretty obvious Google has moved against the best interests of consumers, by their own admission. They now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ads, something their founders correctly proclaimed in the early days to be fundamentally anti user experience. When faced with mobile (and no right side area to allocate ads), they chose to violate their earliest of principles and decided the money mattered a lot more than providing the best product for the consumer. It's merely one example of many that Google isn't acting in the best interest of the consumer with their search monopoly. Yelp can be salty and simultaneously Google can be an abusive monopoly. Sun and Oracle were two of the loudest complainers about Microsoft. It doesn't mean they were wrong, despite their own at times shitty behavior.
- maccard 8y ago
  > hey now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ad Google has done this as long as I can recall - the top few results are always “sponsored”. Yelp also does this, by placing a star on your map instead of a rating.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    Google was created to build an open search engine that doesn't rely on ad revenue. Literally, that's what the original paper says: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
    - jcims 8y ago
      They failed at that a long time ago.
    - efdee 8y ago
      I don't think that is true. It's the first time I've heard about it, anyways.
      - kuschku 8y ago
        That’s why I linked the source above. > This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm. > One of our main goals in designing Google was to set up an environment where other researchers can come in quickly, process large chunks of the web, and produce interesting results that would have been very difficult to produce otherwise. In the short time the system has been up, there have already been several papers using databases generated by Google, and many others are underway. Another goal we have is to set up a Spacelab-like environment where researchers or even students can propose and do interesting experiments on our large-scale web data. From Appendix A > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. […] > Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

annexrichmond 8y ago

TripAdvisor is also not happy: https://www.recode.net/2016/8/6/12393586/google-yelp-tripadvisor-must-try-search-results https://www.recode.net/2016/8/6/12393586/google-yelp-tripadv...

onetimemanytime 8y ago

>>because of Google's improvement to their search engine algorithms. "Improvement": Post Google's own offering first and also fill page with ads to keep users within Google's own sites.

lawrenceyan 8y ago
It might just be my opinion, but I find the user experience to be far better now that I can search for food basically directly on Google Maps. Yelp's UI is pretty janky, especially when I always end up just pasting the address I find on Yelp back into Google Maps at the end of the day so I can drive to the place.

adventured 8y ago

It's pretty obvious Google has moved against the best interests of consumers, by their own admission. They now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ads, something their founders correctly proclaimed in the early days to be fundamentally anti user experience. When faced with mobile (and no right side area to allocate ads), they chose to violate their earliest of principles and decided the money mattered a lot more than providing the best product for the consumer. It's merely one example of many that Google isn't acting in the best interest of the consumer with their search monopoly. Yelp can be salty and simultaneously Google can be an abusive monopoly. Sun and Oracle were two of the loudest complainers about Microsoft. It doesn't mean they were wrong, despite their own at times shitty behavior.

maccard 8y ago
> hey now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ad Google has done this as long as I can recall - the top few results are always “sponsored”. Yelp also does this, by placing a star on your map instead of a rating.
- kuschku 8y ago
  Google was created to build an open search engine that doesn't rely on ad revenue. Literally, that's what the original paper says: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
  - jcims 8y ago
    They failed at that a long time ago.
  - efdee 8y ago
    I don't think that is true. It's the first time I've heard about it, anyways.
    - kuschku 8y ago
      That’s why I linked the source above. > This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm. > One of our main goals in designing Google was to set up an environment where other researchers can come in quickly, process large chunks of the web, and produce interesting results that would have been very difficult to produce otherwise. In the short time the system has been up, there have already been several papers using databases generated by Google, and many others are underway. Another goal we have is to set up a Spacelab-like environment where researchers or even students can propose and do interesting experiments on our large-scale web data. From Appendix A > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. […] > Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.