6 ms·

CBS interview leaves out critical details. Initially, Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn't liked t

CBS interview leaves out critical details. Initially, Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn'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 "private" then Google shouldn't be crawling them at all. That'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. Personally, I don'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'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't consider them good for users or internet or industry. So for me this is pick between the worse evil. 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'm not too sure how alternate world would have looked like. History certainly rhymes here. [1] You can say whatever about IE'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.

mattmanser 8y ago
One company doesn't get to unilaterally decide what is 'fair'.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  True, but there should be a strong presumption that if some company wants to spend their money on a product it’s up to consumers to decide if it’s a success or not rather than the courts. If Yelp gets destroyed because Google decides to give away their entire value add for free that’s no more something that’s no more an injustice to Yelp than Android was to Blackberry, Microsoft or Apple.
  - johnnyfaehell 8y ago
    This comment is mildly funny. You say it should be up to the consumers to decide the success. But that's not what is being suggested is happening. It's being suggested that one company is trying to hide another. It's like if you have a shop selling something and Big Shop Corp comes along and puts up a bunch of trees and bushes in around your shop so it looks like there is only a forest there and no shop. No one is being stopped from going to that shop, but they are being prevented from knowing about the fact there is a shop and the choice of going to that shop instead of Big Shop Corp.
    - maccard 8y ago
      It’s not really. It’s more like you sell a product in BigShop, and they come out with their own range, promote it and stop selling your product. As a consumer you’re still free to go to the other shops and get the product from them instead (in this case Bing, DDG)
      - johnnyfaehell 8y ago
        Google Search is not like a shop, where you go to buy specific things. It's like a road where you go down specific routes looking for things. The difference being in your example you already know what you want, with mines you are searching for what you want.
jaydz 8y ago
Yelp is a trash company, lets not forget how they extorted small businesses for years.
- brisance 8y ago
  I was not able to find a reputable source for this rumor.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    What would be the bar for a reputable source here? An official court conviction?
    - maccard 8y ago
      Any source with any shred of proof, instead of a we-said-they-said blog post.
      - mehrdadn 8y ago
        What do you mean by "proof", if your bar isn't a court conviction? [1] Lots of businesses have filed lawsuits over this over many years... here's just a few of the gazillion I find on Google. [2] [3] [4] [5] It's practically absurd to think these are all over nothing and there's no foul play going on. How many stories do you need before you believe it's possible that maybe not everyone who is suing the same entity is confused or lying? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238051 [2] http://kaohana.windward.hawaii.edu/2017/05/yelp-extortion-is-it-fact-or-fiction/ http://kaohana.windward.hawaii.edu/2017/05/yelp-extortion-is... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238079 [4] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/01/yelp-accused-of-hiding-positive-non-advertiser-reviews.html https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/01/yelp-accused-of-hiding-po... [5] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/yelp-bullying-pay-reviews_n_6468762.html https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/yelp-bullying-pay-r...
        8y ago
johnnyfaehell 8y ago
> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there. Who is to decide what is a crappy 2nd rate product? To me, Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. Can the same be held true for Google? > They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers. If it was donated, how was it theft? > Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape? They were never prevented from competing, they were prevented from preventing others competing.
- spyhi 8y ago
  > Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. This is a dubious claim. There have been periodic blowups about Yelp offering to manipulate how reviews are presented for money. [1][2] Yelp portrays this as advertising [3], like putting a "favorite" review "above the fold" so to speak, but many business owners consistently tell the same story about extortion over negative reviews. I never paid it much attention before, but recently someone I personally know mentioned that her boss (at the time) was paying to remove negative Yelp reviews, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Point is, even if they aren't directly deleting negative reviews, reviews are their main product and pressure over negative reviews seems to be at the very least a sales tactic, so don't be so sure they have no financial benefit from manipulating at least certain aspects of reviews--it's not inconceivable. [1] https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad-reviewsfor-price/ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad-re... [2] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-reviews-business-refuses-pay-advertising/98695/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-rev... [3] https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove-negative-reviews-in-exchange-for-advertising-with-them https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove-negative-reviews-in-e...
- jacksmith21006 8y ago
  Superior? Yelp is awful. Make a better product and it would be higher in search. This is sour grapes and really worry we are going to end up with a worse search engine. There were many search engines before Google. Reason Google won is because they provide better results. Heck MS owns the desktop and still lost search.
annexrichmond 8y ago
> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there 1. So you believe anticompetitive practices are okay when you "personally" don't like the competing product. 2. It is not promoting Yelp when it is the organic search algorithm. The point is that they are demoting Yelp in favor of their own evidently inferior product, as their own algorithm would have otherwise ranked their own product lower in the organic setting. > I hate Yelp. They are greedy bastards who have cornered up huge content entirely contributed by volunteers. No bias here at all... How is this much different from the endless other free-to-use websites out there? > Yelp reviews and ratings should be free and in open domain by vary nature of how it was created So Yelp shouldn't try to build a brand. They should just host all the content and give it away.
- telltruth 8y ago
  In a fair world, there would be an option in Google for "Show me reviews from X" where users are forced to select X (i.e. no defaults provided). The problem is that Yelp is the one who wants to be monopoly and they would never agreed to this. They don't want Google Maps to show any reviews at all. Instead they insist that people must take an additional step to go to Yelp's own website for reviews. This is unworkable. Reviews and ratings decide the ranking in maps query. I as a customer should have an integrated experience in maps instead of having thrown 10 random results for each of which I have to go to Yelp website to figure things out. Lot of search results in maps are driven from review text, for example, names of dishes. The ratings and reviews are integral part of a map product. Yelp doesn't care about how much users would suffer as long as they can get their eyeballs. Google shouldn't be forced to work with these kind of people. Yes, I do strongly believe that any website that harvests volunteers to gather the publicly accessible data must give away that data for free. I can never agree to the business model that a company has sole propitiatory right to that data by duppig millions of people in to labor who didn't cared to read legal T&C stating that all this is going to be behind the wall so CEO can get his billion dollar exit to buy private island while stagnating the company.
  - hueving 8y ago
    >The ratings and reviews are integral part of a map product. No they are not. I and many others I know just use the "map product" for directions to get to places. Google maps was useful long before the integration of the cesspool of crowd-sourced reviews. You might want a map of top 10 whatever voted by the democratic people of Gmaps/Yelp busy-bodies but there is no reason that needs to be in the core. Google maps has an API that lets you plot things on it. Yelp can plot things on it. Leave maps to be maps and keep the clutter of opinion diarrhea out of there.
kolleykibber 8y ago
Google's results are better than yelps. As soon as that isn't true, I'll download yelp again.
- eganist 8y ago
  Interesting. I started using Yelp specifically because Google's results are awful especially around the DC area. Grade inflation is prevalent on every platform except yelp, at least from my experience. I haven't seen any formal research on it and would love to see something confirming or refuting my hunch, but my experience has consistently held that Yelp reviewers are picky almost to a fault--useful when deciding whether I want a solid experience vs. an exceptional one.
  - xapata 8y ago
    Which platform is better varies by city, I've found.
    - dagw 8y ago
      Someone should make a meta-service which searches different review sites depending on where you're searching and what you're looking for.
- jacksmith21006 8y ago
  Exactly and why Yelp is lower down. Where it should be. Instead of Yelp b*tching on 60 minutes they should fix the service and then they would be higher on search. It is how it works.
  - ec109685 8y ago
    No it isn’t. Google can chose to put anyone’s reviews in first position arbitrarily (as a featured result).
    - jacksmith21006 8y ago
lazyjones 8y ago
> Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn't liked that Who would? What would Google do if someone decided to scrape all their Google Maps, Shopping content? Apart from adding stronger Captchas, that is... Google has been stealing content from smaller and better sites to improve their own half-arsed products for many years.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  https://www.google.com/robots.txt https://www.google.com/robots.txt ...?
epc 8y ago
The problem with IE was not that Microsoft developed IE, the problem with IE was that Microsoft used its ownership of the operating system and MS Office as well as contracts with PC manufacturers to give IE an overwhelming advantage over the competition.
- samfisher83 8y ago
  Isn't google doing the same thing. They are using their search dominance to get people to use their other services. If DOJ hadn't forced MSFT to stop making IE the default browser would google be as big. Most people don't ever change the defaults on their browser. If MSFT had been left alone are you sure google would be as big as they are today? I mean they took netscape from 90% market share to like 5% marketshare.
  - epc 8y ago
    Microsoft tied MSIE to Windows distribution, if you wanted to distribute Windows with your PCs you had to agree to Microsoft's terms. In some cases you had to pay Microsoft for a Windows license regardless of whether or not you had installed Windows on the PC. I concede I could be wrong but I do not believe Google Chrome ships with Windows or OS X. Would Google be as big as it is today? I have no idea, but the reason Google is Google has less to do with Microsoft's antitrust case than with dozens of previous commercial search engines failing to compete with them. By the time the MSFT antitrust case was resolved there was no meaningful competition to Microsoft on PCs and Netscape was winding down into the Mozilla project.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    In fact Google is doing exact the same thing - pushing their browser using possibly the worlds most wanted ad spot: the front page of Google. It's almost a one-to-one to Windows pushing their browser by default in the OS that almost everyone used at that time. Edit: I like some other things Google do but they definitely should talk about this internally an do something about it before EU as well as relevant US authorities wakes up and punish them for anti competitive behaviour. Or maybe the relevant authorities should slap them on the wrist first; Microsoft seems to have learned the lesson and is a much nicer company to deal with in many areas now.
monksy 8y ago
As someone that tried to write a scraper against yelp for their reviews. (I wanted to do a recommendation engine to recommend new places based on what/who others liked and what I may liked, but haven't checked out yet). They're VERY aggressive about banning/catching bots. They intentionally inflate their search rankings and will throw a 404 against requests for what they list. (I.e. they'll say that they've found 15 pages of results, but if you hit the 14/15th .. they'll throw a 404) On the other side: You can't pull all of the reviews for a place via their api. You're limited to 3 per business.

mattmanser 8y ago

One company doesn't get to unilaterally decide what is 'fair'.

barry-cotter 8y ago
True, but there should be a strong presumption that if some company wants to spend their money on a product it’s up to consumers to decide if it’s a success or not rather than the courts. If Yelp gets destroyed because Google decides to give away their entire value add for free that’s no more something that’s no more an injustice to Yelp than Android was to Blackberry, Microsoft or Apple.
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago
  This comment is mildly funny. You say it should be up to the consumers to decide the success. But that's not what is being suggested is happening. It's being suggested that one company is trying to hide another. It's like if you have a shop selling something and Big Shop Corp comes along and puts up a bunch of trees and bushes in around your shop so it looks like there is only a forest there and no shop. No one is being stopped from going to that shop, but they are being prevented from knowing about the fact there is a shop and the choice of going to that shop instead of Big Shop Corp.
  - maccard 8y ago
    It’s not really. It’s more like you sell a product in BigShop, and they come out with their own range, promote it and stop selling your product. As a consumer you’re still free to go to the other shops and get the product from them instead (in this case Bing, DDG)
    - johnnyfaehell 8y ago
      Google Search is not like a shop, where you go to buy specific things. It's like a road where you go down specific routes looking for things. The difference being in your example you already know what you want, with mines you are searching for what you want.

jaydz 8y ago

Yelp is a trash company, lets not forget how they extorted small businesses for years.

brisance 8y ago
I was not able to find a reputable source for this rumor.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  What would be the bar for a reputable source here? An official court conviction?
  - maccard 8y ago
    Any source with any shred of proof, instead of a we-said-they-said blog post.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      What do you mean by "proof", if your bar isn't a court conviction? [1] Lots of businesses have filed lawsuits over this over many years... here's just a few of the gazillion I find on Google. [2] [3] [4] [5] It's practically absurd to think these are all over nothing and there's no foul play going on. How many stories do you need before you believe it's possible that maybe not everyone who is suing the same entity is confused or lying? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238051 [2] http://kaohana.windward.hawaii.edu/2017/05/yelp-extortion-is-it-fact-or-fiction/ http://kaohana.windward.hawaii.edu/2017/05/yelp-extortion-is... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238079 [4] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/01/yelp-accused-of-hiding-positive-non-advertiser-reviews.html https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/01/yelp-accused-of-hiding-po... [5] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/yelp-bullying-pay-reviews_n_6468762.html https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/yelp-bullying-pay-r...
      - 8y ago

johnnyfaehell 8y ago

> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there. Who is to decide what is a crappy 2nd rate product? To me, Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. Can the same be held true for Google? > They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers. If it was donated, how was it theft? > Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape? They were never prevented from competing, they were prevented from preventing others competing.

spyhi 8y ago
> Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. This is a dubious claim. There have been periodic blowups about Yelp offering to manipulate how reviews are presented for money. [1][2] Yelp portrays this as advertising [3], like putting a "favorite" review "above the fold" so to speak, but many business owners consistently tell the same story about extortion over negative reviews. I never paid it much attention before, but recently someone I personally know mentioned that her boss (at the time) was paying to remove negative Yelp reviews, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Point is, even if they aren't directly deleting negative reviews, reviews are their main product and pressure over negative reviews seems to be at the very least a sales tactic, so don't be so sure they have no financial benefit from manipulating at least certain aspects of reviews--it's not inconceivable. [1] https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad-reviewsfor-price/ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad-re... [2] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-reviews-business-refuses-pay-advertising/98695/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-rev... [3] https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove-negative-reviews-in-exchange-for-advertising-with-them https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove-negative-reviews-in-e...
jacksmith21006 8y ago
Superior? Yelp is awful. Make a better product and it would be higher in search. This is sour grapes and really worry we are going to end up with a worse search engine. There were many search engines before Google. Reason Google won is because they provide better results. Heck MS owns the desktop and still lost search.

annexrichmond 8y ago

> Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there 1. So you believe anticompetitive practices are okay when you "personally" don't like the competing product. 2. It is not promoting Yelp when it is the organic search algorithm. The point is that they are demoting Yelp in favor of their own evidently inferior product, as their own algorithm would have otherwise ranked their own product lower in the organic setting. > I hate Yelp. They are greedy bastards who have cornered up huge content entirely contributed by volunteers. No bias here at all... How is this much different from the endless other free-to-use websites out there? > Yelp reviews and ratings should be free and in open domain by vary nature of how it was created So Yelp shouldn't try to build a brand. They should just host all the content and give it away.

telltruth 8y ago
In a fair world, there would be an option in Google for "Show me reviews from X" where users are forced to select X (i.e. no defaults provided). The problem is that Yelp is the one who wants to be monopoly and they would never agreed to this. They don't want Google Maps to show any reviews at all. Instead they insist that people must take an additional step to go to Yelp's own website for reviews. This is unworkable. Reviews and ratings decide the ranking in maps query. I as a customer should have an integrated experience in maps instead of having thrown 10 random results for each of which I have to go to Yelp website to figure things out. Lot of search results in maps are driven from review text, for example, names of dishes. The ratings and reviews are integral part of a map product. Yelp doesn't care about how much users would suffer as long as they can get their eyeballs. Google shouldn't be forced to work with these kind of people. Yes, I do strongly believe that any website that harvests volunteers to gather the publicly accessible data must give away that data for free. I can never agree to the business model that a company has sole propitiatory right to that data by duppig millions of people in to labor who didn't cared to read legal T&C stating that all this is going to be behind the wall so CEO can get his billion dollar exit to buy private island while stagnating the company.
- hueving 8y ago
  >The ratings and reviews are integral part of a map product. No they are not. I and many others I know just use the "map product" for directions to get to places. Google maps was useful long before the integration of the cesspool of crowd-sourced reviews. You might want a map of top 10 whatever voted by the democratic people of Gmaps/Yelp busy-bodies but there is no reason that needs to be in the core. Google maps has an API that lets you plot things on it. Yelp can plot things on it. Leave maps to be maps and keep the clutter of opinion diarrhea out of there.

kolleykibber 8y ago

Google's results are better than yelps. As soon as that isn't true, I'll download yelp again.

eganist 8y ago
Interesting. I started using Yelp specifically because Google's results are awful especially around the DC area. Grade inflation is prevalent on every platform except yelp, at least from my experience. I haven't seen any formal research on it and would love to see something confirming or refuting my hunch, but my experience has consistently held that Yelp reviewers are picky almost to a fault--useful when deciding whether I want a solid experience vs. an exceptional one.
- xapata 8y ago
  Which platform is better varies by city, I've found.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Someone should make a meta-service which searches different review sites depending on where you're searching and what you're looking for.
jacksmith21006 8y ago
Exactly and why Yelp is lower down. Where it should be. Instead of Yelp b*tching on 60 minutes they should fix the service and then they would be higher on search. It is how it works.
- ec109685 8y ago
  No it isn’t. Google can chose to put anyone’s reviews in first position arbitrarily (as a featured result).
  - jacksmith21006 8y ago

lazyjones 8y ago

> Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn't liked that Who would? What would Google do if someone decided to scrape all their Google Maps, Shopping content? Apart from adding stronger Captchas, that is... Google has been stealing content from smaller and better sites to improve their own half-arsed products for many years.

saalweachter 8y ago
https://www.google.com/robots.txt https://www.google.com/robots.txt ...?

epc 8y ago

The problem with IE was not that Microsoft developed IE, the problem with IE was that Microsoft used its ownership of the operating system and MS Office as well as contracts with PC manufacturers to give IE an overwhelming advantage over the competition.

samfisher83 8y ago
Isn't google doing the same thing. They are using their search dominance to get people to use their other services. If DOJ hadn't forced MSFT to stop making IE the default browser would google be as big. Most people don't ever change the defaults on their browser. If MSFT had been left alone are you sure google would be as big as they are today? I mean they took netscape from 90% market share to like 5% marketshare.
- epc 8y ago
  Microsoft tied MSIE to Windows distribution, if you wanted to distribute Windows with your PCs you had to agree to Microsoft's terms. In some cases you had to pay Microsoft for a Windows license regardless of whether or not you had installed Windows on the PC. I concede I could be wrong but I do not believe Google Chrome ships with Windows or OS X. Would Google be as big as it is today? I have no idea, but the reason Google is Google has less to do with Microsoft's antitrust case than with dozens of previous commercial search engines failing to compete with them. By the time the MSFT antitrust case was resolved there was no meaningful competition to Microsoft on PCs and Netscape was winding down into the Mozilla project.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  In fact Google is doing exact the same thing - pushing their browser using possibly the worlds most wanted ad spot: the front page of Google. It's almost a one-to-one to Windows pushing their browser by default in the OS that almost everyone used at that time. Edit: I like some other things Google do but they definitely should talk about this internally an do something about it before EU as well as relevant US authorities wakes up and punish them for anti competitive behaviour. Or maybe the relevant authorities should slap them on the wrist first; Microsoft seems to have learned the lesson and is a much nicer company to deal with in many areas now.

monksy 8y ago

As someone that tried to write a scraper against yelp for their reviews. (I wanted to do a recommendation engine to recommend new places based on what/who others liked and what I may liked, but haven't checked out yet). They're VERY aggressive about banning/catching bots. They intentionally inflate their search rankings and will throw a 404 against requests for what they list. (I.e. they'll say that they've found 15 pages of results, but if you hit the 14/15th .. they'll throw a 404) On the other side: You can't pull all of the reviews for a place via their api. You're limited to 3 per business.