17 ms·

Google “hijacked millions of customers and orders” from restaurants – lawsuit

434 points by JaimeThompson 5y ago

blakesterz 5y ago
I've seen this when searching for restaurants, and I spotted it right away. It's a classic dark pattern and I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this. Google search results have become dangerous (for lack of a better word) and really hard to use when searching for some things lately. I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me. I understand they want to squeeze every possible dollar out of every search, but I no longer trust them for certain searches. I'm not even talking about the results, this is just what's on the actual Google search results page. There's just way too many ads and other tricks like this happening.
- zivkovicp 5y ago
  The irony is that these techniques are against their own TOS for Adsense/Adwords, but I guess it's more of a "do as I say, not as I do" sort of situation.
  - blakesterz 5y ago
    That reminds me of an old tweet from someone to Matt Cutts (at least I think it was Cutts). MC had tweeted a reply to someone about how they don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites. Someone else replied to him with a screenshot of Google's search results page that had scraped and reused something from somewhere and said "I think I found one of those sites for you". (Hoping I remember that at least somewhat close to how it happened! It's a somewhat faded memory from several years ago)
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      Funny, I guess. But pages that scrape short excerpts from other sites and link back to them in order to provide additional value to a user absolutely are allowed by Google. Sites that scrape large portions of text and don't credit it back aren't allowed and would be illegal. An example of an allowed page doing this would be a "recipe roundup" where a site lists 10 or so recipes in a particular theme (like Best Keto Breakfast Recipes) and each one links back to the original recipe with a short description. I'm not surprised this sort of "gotcha" was popular on Twitter though (and is why I don't use Twitter)
      - klyrs 5y ago
        Only, google rarely credits the sources they scraped for infoboxes.
        weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        For things that are considered facts they don't. But for Featured Snippets they do. If something is a widely recognized fact you don't need to credit a source in your own writing too
        squeaky-clean 5y ago
        Google gets "facts" wrong pretty often because it gathers them by scraping. There are too many possible facts for them to have all been verified by a human.
        klyrs 5y ago
        Is some random celebrity's net worth a "widely recognized fact"? https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
        weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        You did not understand my comment - I said Featured Snippets are NOT necessarily facts and DO link to the source. Featured Snippets drive a lot of traffic to sites and as a publisher I instruct my writers on how to craft their sentences to make it more likely we will get a Featured Snippet. Yes, Featured Snippets probably reduced the CTR for pages that were previously ranking #1 but that comes with an increase in user experience. Part of the confusion here stems from the fact you used an ambiguous term like "infobox" that has no real meaning and I interpreted as the box that appears on the sidebar when Googling certain topics (like somebody's name). This typically pulls data from Wikipedia and Wikidata as FACTS. So if by infobox you meant Featured Snippet then your comment was incorrect because Google does in fact always link back the original site (maybe in the last they sometimes didn't? I can't speak to that but I'm doubtful) Also I'll just say this - the website in question in that article was relying on Google for all their traffic for a very particular type of query. That is just stupid. I'm a publisher and wouldn't be able to sleep at night if my site was like theirs. Technically Net Worth is a fact and that's why Google was trying to put it in their Knowledge Graph. But since it's not typically public knowledge it becomes more of an opinion. Hence, it's a Featured Snippet with credit to the source. That site is just mad they don't always get the Featured Snippet so their traffic went down. They weren't complaining when Google was ranking them #1 were they?
    - dazc 5y ago
      That did happen, as you describe it.
    - random314 5y ago
      The top search result was Google scraping from wikipedia.
    - wolpoli 5y ago
      > don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites. I remember there used to be ranking penalties against scraper sites. I have not been following Google's SEO rules in a while, so does anyone know what happened to it?
      - Implicated 5y ago
        It's essentially the 'duplicate content' penalty/penalties. [1] It's pretty ironic really... take a look at this scenario... Let's say we have Website A which we'll consider a "legitimate" website producing unique and quality content and we have Website B which is not, but it has some clever people running it's scrapers/submissions.. Developer responsible for Website B has identified that Website A produces quality content that it wants to steal - setups up a scraper to check for updates on Website A, when it finds them it will immediately scrape the content and repost it on Website B. Then they will update their sitemap and submit it to Google (or some other of the various ways to 'alert' google of a new page/updated content) which will trigger a crawl of that page/website. If this crawl/index of Website B happens before Website A - who does Google see as the producer of that content and who is now the "duplicate"? Whack-a-mole. 1: https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content
- resygonewrong 5y ago
  I just tried making reservations for an anniversary dinner, so I Google "Obstinate Daughter" and they put up a little widget for Resy and lo and behold there are no good reservations times available despite it being zero-dark-thirty on the first day one could even make reservations for my targeted date. Now I'm a bit skeptical that the city collectively got up at the ass-crack of dawn to make a dinner reservation on a random weeknight, so I go visit the restaurant website and they have a wide open calendar. Had I not scrutinized the Google offerings the restaurant would have lost out on my business. IANAL but that whole offering on the part of Google just seems morally wrong if not some form of fraudulent.
  - krnlpnc 5y ago
    So I wonder what's the end game of a pattern like this? Is it a shakedown type of situation where if a restaurant doesn't pay up to enable some reservations "integration" they will be shown as fully booked by default?
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      Google does all kinds of stupid things like this. They constantly change how they interpret data and punish anyone who doesn't (or can't) follow the new rules. They'll suddenly require X to be valid against a specific standard, but the maker of the product you sell doesn't follow X. Oh, and omitting X is the same as having an invalid X. Frankly, it's ridiculous. We have to have an entire paid position just for dealing with Google's bullshit.
  - zerocrates 5y ago
    As far as I see that restaurant just does in fact use Resy and it looks to me like Google just shows the same results the Resy site does. What they do do is just not show you times that are outside a window around the selected time (and they preselect one) so maybe that's the issue? I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.
- djitz 5y ago
  Yep. I noticed this when they started doing it in maps. I always wonder what their commission is, which is in turn part of the commission for Grubhub or any other food delivery service. You have to make a real effort to avoid their crap hurdles just to make it to the damn restaurant’s own website.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  "I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me." I've noticed it only a handful of times, but phone numbers for listings, can't be trusted either anymore [1] GrubHub also does it: there has been more than one occasion where I've searched a restaurant in a new town while traveling for work, called the phone number to inquire about a menu item thinking I was dialing the restaurant but I had instead dialed a GrubHub or Goggle contact center. At first I didn't realize what was going on, but quickly put it together after ordering from a restaurant that appeared in Google, using the "order form" and getting a phone call from a different voice telling me the item I ordered hadn't been sold by the restaurant in weeks due to sourcing issues. "I just spoke with Mark, he said you do sell it" "We don't have anyone named Mark working here" I go check the listing again, check the phone number, and ask the person on the other end of the line what the restaurant business telephone number is: sure enough it's a completely different number. Not sure how widespread this is or how to tell which restaurant phone numbers on these platforms take me to someone actually at the establishment, but....well...shit like this. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-restaurant-phone-numbers-on-yelp.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-res.... (article is from 2019 but this has happened to me as recently as oct/2021)
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    Do they actually pretend to be the restaurant on the phone, like they answer with "Tony's Pizza" if that's the restaurant?
    - dvtrn 5y ago
      They did, yes. I’m not qualified to know whether or not this counts as some kind of fraud, but it was the final straw for me to stop using these delivery services once and for all after other unrelated negative experiences with them.
      - colejohnson66 5y ago
        IANAL, but for the websites, it's easily trademark infringement. In-N-Out notably sued DoorDash over them using the In-N-Out logo on the site.[0] It's understandable why. If a customer receives a bad order due to GrubHub, DoorDash, etc., it reflects badly on the restaurant, even if it's not their fault. See claim 29 from the filing[1]: > Defendant’s use of Plaintiff’s famous trademarks implies that Defendant not only delivers In-N-Out products to its customers, but that the quality and services offered by Defendant is the same as if consumers had made purchases directly from Plaintiff. Upon information and belief, the quality of services offered by Defendant does not at all comport with the standards that consumers expect from Plaintiff’s goods and services. Further, Plaintiff has no control over the time it takes Defendant to deliver Plaintiff’s goods to consumers, or over the temperature at which the goods are kept during delivery, nor over the food handling and safety practices of Defendant’s delivery drivers. While Plaintiff adheres to the Food Code, on information and belief, Defendant does not adhere to such regulations, including with regard to compliance with required food safety and handling practices. [0]: https://money.cnn.com/2015/11/12/technology/in-n-out-doordash-delivery-lawsuit/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/11/12/technology/in-n-out-doordas... [1]: https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-delivery-lawsuit https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...
- acomjean 5y ago
  I always try to go the website. But I think adding some murk is that some restaurants use third party order systems like by door dash via the generic: https://order.online/en-US/ https://order.online/en-US/ For example this is a doordash site (set up by the restaurant): https://order.online/business/-54797/en-US https://order.online/business/-54797/en-US A restaurant tried to call me about an order, but coming from a toll free number I ignored it. I asked them why they didn't have a local number. They could only call me back via the door dash number as my number wasn't provided to the restaurant. It was weird. Around here the local restaurant POS vendor exposed their interface online and made and app for pickups. I'll use that directly if I'm ordering from a place that uses it. Thats a little fraught too, because the staff has to learn to use that too (staff has to have some training on turing online ordering on or off..which they sometimes have forgotten to do) https://pos.toasttab.com https://pos.toasttab.com
  - noasaservice 5y ago
    Remember, that DoorDash is YC13. Ycombinator is enabling this kind of behavior, either historically or currently. I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. And barring active influence, they should outwardly denounce companies that choose to engage in these kinds of scams. (I have a private plugin that does company searches and sees if they are a YC company. You'd be really surprised just how many negative articles are YC founded companies.) Edit: and the downvotes commence
    - david38 5y ago
      Yea, I don’t see YC as any kind of moral filter despite it appears to have that kind of halo.
    - mikestew 5y ago
      I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. Why do you call out YC specifically? Maybe I missed the memo, but I don't look at companies coming out of YC as being made from some special moral fiber. Quite the contrary in a lot of cases, and DoorDash is just one example. If there's anything YC is "auditing", my guess is that it's a P/L sheet, not questionable business decisions.
- Unklejoe 5y ago
  > I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this. My guess is that most restaurants don’t even know where to begin when it comes to suing something like Google. At least that’s how I would feel.
tpmx 5y ago
I guess it's about https://orderfood.google.com/ https://orderfood.google.com/ (US only, VPN works) + links in organic search results.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xphilter 5y ago
I passed on a case like this years ago -- a restaurant claimed Google hijacked the listing, it turns out they had signed a B2B deal with some food delivery/ordering app that had, in the terms, the right to share this info with others, including Google. Good luck to the restaurant here, but they won't get the same benefit of the doubt consumers (sometimes) get when signing contracts.
grumple 5y ago
This always bothers me. I won't click the "Order Online" button anymore. I'll look for the restaurants website (which often isn't the Website button either) and order directly. If I ran a restaurant, I would never partner with these platforms directly. Let them sell your food, but don't take a loss on the sale just so they can take some profit. I doubt there's much new customer acquisition through these platforms to justify the cost.
- soco 5y ago
  I already do this for hotel bookings. I'm fed up with Google, Booking.com or whoever trying to trick me into paying them for zero added value.
  - anaccountexists 5y ago
    You can’t directly book through Google, if I remember correctly. They’ll kick you out to the business’ site to do that. They’re just an aggregator and get paid in referral fees. The value for you is in the aggregation engine.
  - dawnerd 5y ago
    The worst thing about hotel rates is the hotels themselves basically force you to go through a third party unless you want to pay their insane markups. You'd think they'd want you to book directly too...
devmor 5y ago
They have a solid point. I've had a couple different experiences where I clicked on a restaurant on Google Maps and thought I was looking at their official menu - ordered some food and called the restaurant when it never arrived only to find out they never got the order and don't use that delivery service.
akersten 5y ago
At the end of the day do these restaurants not cook and sell the food, or is Google running a secret shadow kitchen and swapping out the cuisine too? If you put a service on the Internet (restaurant website, or making order pickup available from food delivery service), it's going to be consumed. You really have no right to complain about how - Firefox, text based browser, screen reader, printed and physically mailed, or wrapped in another website. Interoperability is a beautiful thing, and if anything, should be made more legal. Your restaurant website probably isn't accessible either. At least Google's is.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  No one's asserting they're swapping out the food. I'd bet it's more on the "trademark violation" end of things.
  - akersten 5y ago
    > No one's asserting they're swapping out the food. With the amount of vitriol in this thread one wouldn't have been blamed for thinking they were, is my point. We call ourselves Hackers and we're mad about this?
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Yes, I'd be mad if someone was using the name of my business to siphon off 30% of my revenue.
      - akersten 5y ago
        To be charged a 30% fee, is part of the business agreement that the restaurant voluntarily entered with that food delivery company though?? I'm gonna leave this thread now, complaining about this is just nuts...
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        > The restaurant voluntarily entered a relationship with that food delivery company though?? In many cases, no. https://www.eater.com/21537215/restaurants-sue-third-party-delivery-service-grubhub-for-listing-businesses-without-permission https://www.eater.com/21537215/restaurants-sue-third-party-d... > Grubhub has explicitly made this false partnership part of their business strategy. Last October, CEO Matt Maloney said the company would be piloting a new initiative of adding more restaurants to its searchable database without entering into an official partnership with them, so customers would believe they had more delivery options with Grubhub, and wouldn’t switch to competitors. Re: your edit... > To be charged a 30% fee... If you don't have a deal with them, they can raise prices to get their cut. Shitty customer experience; they'll likely blame the restaurant for gouging them. Same if they list items not available from an old menu; restaurant gets blamed. There are some funny arbitrage opportunities with the non-consensual listings: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
indymike 5y ago
I pulled the plug on Google Search about two months ago and switched to Brave's new search engine. It works for me. Search is a tough product because nearly every way you come up with to monetize it counts in either diluting the SERPs with paid listings or diverting clicks to something other than what the user is looking for. I.e. I search for a movie and get the Google movie listing instead of a listing for the website for the actual movie. On Brave Search: I've had to use Google search twice in the past month, and it was useful one of those times, so Brave has been fantastic so far. In the past,the new search engine usually lasts about 3-4 days and I give up and go back to Google. This time... well... still using Brave.
- Method-X 5y ago
  My experience with Brave Search has been fantastic as well. I also like the UI much more than any other search engine I've used.
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  Monetization wouldn’t be an issue if we paid for these services. I’d be willing to pay $5-10 a month for a good search engine that respects your privacy. But I guess the average person hates the idea of paying for any software these days.
  - Folcon 5y ago
    As much as I subscribe to this perspective, when I think about how much money must be flowing through these ecosystems, I wonder if that's the real price point? I mean theoretically how much would you be willing to pay for search that has no advertisement. $1000 a year? I'm genuinely curious, what would a privacy first non-advertising based approach cost? I mean I suspect you could discount it by not tracking individual users but instead just advertise on results searched, but what does the extreme version of this cost like do you think? What kind of money do we need to put on the table that someone serving it goes, you know what, let's just provide a great search product, if we start trying to mess around with ads / tracking, we're risking killing this golden goose?
notyourday 5y ago
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  https://cottonbureau.com/products/its-not-rico https://cottonbureau.com/products/its-not-rico
- onion2k 5y ago
  I don't think RICO applies, but section 2 of the Sherman Act (abuse of dominant position) might.
  - mountainb 5y ago
    Cranks just like bringing up RICO because it is so broad. But the government only uses RICO for the things it wants to, not the random stuff that cranks want the government to do. Most people think that the government is basically like Batman and just sits around waiting to get a call from someone who has found a crime. In reality, society is awash with (think of a random big number) multiples of what the government has the capacity to address, and it picks and chooses the targets that it wants to enforce against.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      RICO isn't broad. The predicate acts of RICO are an explicitly enumerated list (see https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961 for the full list). Then there's the tricky part that the defendant has to be doing that on behalf of a particular enterprise. (See https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/ https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-... for a fuller description). Most internet peanut gallery shouts of "RICO!" are not, in fact, RICO.
naoqj 5y ago
>If the restaurant has a relationship with the food delivery company, it gets charged a fee. These fees can be so high—15 to 30 percent in many cases—that the restaurant has no hope of making a profit from the order. It's Google's fault that the owners of these restaurants don't know how to use Excel?
- mring33621 5y ago
  It is Google's fault that they are forcing an elderly Thai couple, who have owned a restaurant in Wrigleyville for 20 years, to spend extra time and effort to figure out how to protect their meager profits from internet-based poachers.
  - naoqj 5y ago
    That's an appeal to emotion, not a rational argument. Restaurant owners should know the maximum fee that the delivery apps are charging (since they are signing the contract) and adjust prices accordingly. If they are "an elderly Thai couple" (because as we know old people and Thais are idiots) that has managed to reach old age without bankrupting their restaurant, surely they can calculate the impact of the fees of the contracts that they sign on their business.
    - mring33621 5y ago
      How about this then? Many restaurant owners, including the ones I mentioned, are unaware of the existence of these unofficial ordering channels (websites, phone numbers). They claim that they did not sign up for any of this. My wife recently was tricked into calling one of these fake numbers on a fake, but official-looking restaurant website. The person on the other end pretended to be the restaurant that we wanted to order from. But my wife grew suspicious when the person knew nothing about the menu. You keep talking about contracts. But simply saying that 'you signed a contract' does not make it true.
      - naoqj 5y ago
        Are you saying that these restaurants are selling food at 30% discount without even knowing what they are doing? That makes absolutely no sense.
anaccountexists 5y ago
Google is the closest group to the consumer here, but the actual bad actors are DoorDash / GrubHub / etc. The delivery companies add the restaurants to their sites without permission, then Google indexes those pages and provides smart widgets for them. Take away the delivery companies’ bad practices, you take away the Google experience the restaurants don’t like.
- krnlpnc 5y ago
  No, Google is far from helpless in detection of these types of issues. Business owners should be able to claim and manage the features which are enabled on their accounts, and nothing should be enabled by default beyond the basic contact info and possibly reviews.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  If DoorDash and GrubHub are the bad actors, and what they're doing is well enough known that people on HN know about it, why can't Google adjust their algorithms accordingly? Hell, with two big companies like that they could just sanction them directly for subverting the algorithms. I think it makes the most sense to hold Google responsible here since they are in the best position to solve the problem and they're not showing any inclination to do so.
  - dontreact 5y ago
    Funny how there is pushback on the YCombinator forum to an attempt to hold accountable a YCombinator company that actually has a direct hand in doing this to restaurants. How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't? The vast majority of these postings are fine/legitimate/consented. Why does it have to be Google that spends time and energy going after the bad actors, and if they don't, they become one? In other words, I really don't see how Google is in the best position to figure out which restaurants have been posted without the restaurant's consent. I think that would be the companies putting up the original post.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
stevespang 5y ago
johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
Google isn't even in restaurants business and they are already defrauding the restaurants. No wonder people hate Google and love Amazon. Amazon has been doing business with small business and has never taken advantage of them. Meanwhile Google is siphoning money from small restaurants during the pandemic.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  > Amazon has been doing business with small business and has never taken advantage of them. Oh, wow. I think the countless small businesses that have been essentially forced out by AmazonBasics would disagree with you.
- natpalmer1776 5y ago
  While it is still under contention, see recent news surrounding the Amazon Basics brands.
lizardactivist 5y ago
Sometimes it seems like Google think the internet is "theirs".
- deutschew 5y ago
  either they truly have lost touch with their userbase or the large majority of users simply do not care. in any case i'd love to use DDG but the results simply isn't good and I always end up coming back to google. just wish we could give them less information. but seems they are anti-competitive, youtube vanced is another recent example.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    Try Kagi. Free in beta, paid-for in due course, but excellent results.
  - P_I_Staker 5y ago
    I hate to say it, but I can't stick with DDG. It's bad enough for my uses, that I have to constantly switch back to google. I know mileage may vary for others.
    - deutschew 5y ago
      same situation, although I recall, there is another search engine that anonymizes your google search....just can't recall what it's called
      - shubhamkrm 5y ago
        It's called startpage.
        deutschew 5y ago
        yes! weird thing after I installed it, google chrome immediately used a dark pattern to get me to disable it. if I had been a below user average, i would've given up!
endisneigh 5y ago
> On those pages, customers are prompted with large buttons to order with food delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, or Seamless.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I've sometimes wanted to order food ahead of time at local restaurants and pick it up but when I see a poorly branded ordering form on a web site with a generic domain name I've got little faith my order is going to be processed at all, never mind correctly. (... even if it is on the up-and-up there is still the concern that the restaurant doesn't have good processes in place to handle online orders. Years ago I tried online ordering from a local sub shop which handled in-store orders so well one could imagine it being the subject of a business school case study and they screwed up my online order because it didn't fit in their process.) It may really be the restaurant that contracts with some web site to put up an ordering form, maybe the whole thing is a scam. Either way I just don't do it unless I really know online ordering is effective.
robotcookies 5y ago
I had this happen to me. Went to order something for pickup from maps. I thought it was the restaurant's page but the order went through postmates. When I arrived to pick up my order, the staff seemed to think I was an employee of postmates. Anyway, when I got home I did some searching and found out the restaurant had a different webpage from what I ordered from. The prices I paid were a little higher than the actual business websites. It seems postmates charged me more, taking a cut while doing nothing to make the food or deliver it. What a parasitic business to inject yourself as a third party like that.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  There's been quite a few companies doing some growth hacking, or I guess straight up stealing by putting their url as the url for a restaurant. It's hard to trust anything Google maps tells me since there's no real source of truth. Zomato needs to be banned from Google maps.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    >growth hacking This is just techbro euphemism for "lie to your users."
    - ajhurliman 5y ago
      This particular instance is definitely lying to users, but in general "growth hacking" isn't necessarily so evil. Like adding "sent with Hotmail" at the bottom of the free email service, or offering a printable certificate of your store's Yelp rating to show off to in-person customers.
    - tremon 5y ago
      I thought it was a euphemism for "lie to your investors"?
  - i67vw3 5y ago
    Zomato is the worst thing I have seen. I stopped using it and moved to Swiggy. To order from zomato, you need their app, you cannot order from their website. On swiggy, you can either order from their website or app. I like to order stuff of any service from their website. Usually, the play/app store apps are filled with ads, trackers, spyware.
walnutclosefarm 5y ago
Yet another example of the misleading attempts to capture business inquiries by intermediaries. This has long been the case in the hospitality industry, where third party bookers make their ads look so deceptively like you're going to the actual hotel website that I have trouble sorting them out, despite considerable knowledge of their tricks. Ditto insurance - you can't find clean links to Medicare services, or actual ACA insurance exchanges half the time, for the blizzard of brokers' links/ads that appear high in the search results. This is only partly Google's fault though - it's the brokers and other re-intermediaries really fueling it. They ought to be sanctioned along with Google.
specialist 5y ago
If any one has model (draft) legislation to prohibit misc hijacking strategies, please share. I've chatted with my local reps (city & state), who sounded supportive. Figuring out some kind of policy proposal is on my To Do list.
- bootlooped 5y ago
  It's easy to think of ways this backfires if written too broadly. Such as the record label claiming the local record shop is hijacking their search results and stealing their sales, they want them delisted so searches always go to the record label's online store.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    > It's easy to think of ways this backfires if written too broadly. That can (and often is, with unproductive outcomes) be said about everything.
    - immibis 5y ago
      Yes, and that's why politics is hard.
bootlooped 5y ago
The merchant is able to set something on that page, the one with the ordering options, that would label their own website "Preferred by business". If you ever see it, it's fairly prominent. To me this almost totally invalidates the basis for the lawsuit. As an example look up Emmy Squared Pizza: East Village in NYC.
- mission_failed 5y ago
  'restaurants can choose to opt out of our fraud after we force set up a fake store front' is hardly an argument against a lawsuit
specialp 5y ago
I was just in a coffee shop the other day and a man was telling the clerk he called in an order, and they took it, and he is there to pick it up. The shop had no record of this, and the number that he called was not their number. He said that is really weird, I talked to someone and they took my order. I remembered the dark pattern deployed by GrubHub, and googled the shop. Sure enough the number was the same as the one the man called. The shop had no idea that this was going on, and apparently GrubHub failed to forward that order. This is being done with little or no indication to either party that someone is in the middle.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  Isn't this fraud, on the part of Google, Grub Hub, or both? The customer thinks they're dealing with the business, but one of these two services has MITM'd the service, passing themselves off as the business.
  - kuang_eleven 5y ago
    Yes. We should be contacting local attorney generals or equivalent.
impalallama 5y ago
this is disappointing to learn about, i have ordered through these options before, usually for in store pickup so its unfortunate that i'm still using these predatory services that i've been working to avoid
kaslai 5y ago
While this isn't directly Google's doing, they do enable it for other services too: when I was on a road trip, I realized that I was going to need one additional hotel stay before getting home, so at 1 AM I was shopping around for a hotel on my phone and found a place that looked decent enough. I looked up their web page to get their phone number (since I don't trust the Google side-bar) to call them and everything seemed normal enough. I clarified what their pet policy was over the phone and they said I was fine to bring the pets I needed to bring. They said that bringing a large dog and a cat was fine, so I thought everything was good. When I got there, the person handling check-in complained that I was violating hotel policy, as they only allowed one pet and only small dogs were allowed. I was confused as I had specifically asked when booking if they would be allowed and I was assured that it was fine. Thankfully we were allowed to keep the reservation given that we were keeping the animals crated while in the room. When I got home, I compared the phone number in my dial history to the one on the hotel's website, and I noticed that they were different. After a lot of confusion, I tried replicating my steps to navigate to the hotel's website on my phone and realized that I had actually clicked on an "Ad" link on Google to get to the website, rather than the organic result. The webpages were almost identical, with the only difference being the phone number. Presumably the "Ad" link was put up by a booking site to funnel phone traffic away from the legitimate site. Presumably because I was tired, I either didn't notice it was an ad, or I figured that it would be equivalent to the organic search result, but it could have potentially caused me to have to find a hotel that accepts big dogs with vacancy at 11 PM in a city I don't know, in addition to wasting my money since the reservations weren't refundable at that point. tl;dr: Booking sites use Google ads to steal organic traffic intended to go directly to hotels and caused me to unintentionally violate a hotel's pet policy
registeredcorn 5y ago
After reading the entire article, the picture has become a bit clearer. Just to recap the ups and downs of the wishy-washy language these corporate bottomfeeders are using: >We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature. So gogle states that they made this without any intention of compensation. >While The Ordering App was initially set up to take a percentage of sales, Okay, no. So they have* received compensation for this, but intend to never receive profit in the future? >gogle waived it “to help support restaurants affected during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Again, no. So they were* charging, and were collecting exactly the fees they said they weren't, but now they've stopped... "'cuz covid or whatever. See how loving and giving your global overlord is treating its filthy, disgusting peasants? :^)" Basically, gogle waived the fee because they can afford to - for now - and want customers to get accustomed to using it before* they start charging for it (again) after it's reached some predefined metric. How gracious of them to deceive us with such carefully crafted lies. >Companies that have completed the “Order Online” setup with gogle can also direct customers to their own online ordering services. Okay, so this only* impacts companies that want to participate in this stupid online ordering setup? >If restaurants haven’t completed the setup, gogle appears to create a page anyway... Okay, so no. This isn't just people who want to participate. Whether or not a restaurant has any* interest whatsoever in a listing on gogle, their (potential) customers will be given the impression that the restaurant has an online ordering feature. >...It’s unclear how that happens, though it’s possible that a restaurant’s appearance in a delivery app is what triggers it. So, presumably, NO ONE at gogle knows how or why this happens, or at least, no one is unwilling to say how or why this happens because they're whorish enough to keep their scummy mouths shut. So, whether or not a restaurant has ANY intention of working with 3rd parties, those 3rd parties will still try to profit off of restaurants hard work, and potentially drive away business by the higher charges associated with online ordering... >If the restaurant has a relationship with the food delivery company, it gets charged a fee. These fees can be so high—15 to 30 percent in many cases—that the restaurant has no hope of making a profit from the order. ...and if the restaurant actively participates in asinine online ordering, the only thing they can possibly gain out of it is... > “Rather, a restaurant’s usual goal is to capture new customers that may later place orders with the restaurant outside of the Delivery Providers’ expensive platforms.” ...blind hope that, after a customer gets accustomed to purchasing through a very specific means, that suddenly without warning, the customer will then completely change methods into paying a completely different way (in-person, over the phone, etc.) And ultimately, whether or not they play ball with that 3rd party parasite, they're still being listed on that stupid 3rd party website, which in turn is pimping them out to daddy g*ogle for a taste of exposure, which benefits all parties. Except for the restaurant or customer. Yeah, I can see why this resulted in a lawsuit.
kevinschumacher 5y ago
I could be wrong here, but, I think the lawsuit is totally misdirected. Restaurants should be upset with the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) instead. The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent. (Or, perhaps worse, offering orders without restaurant consent?) Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2] I don't think Google even takes a cut! I worked on an integration to a similar API, "Reserve with Google" [3]. With that one, at least, it can be enabled/disabled at the restaurant level. I assume that "Order with Google" is similar. [1] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering [2] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering/guides/build/integration-steps https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering/guides/b... [3] https://www.google.com/maps/reserve/ https://www.google.com/maps/reserve/
- ptudan 5y ago
  I would be shocked if google didn't get a cut, or at least a pay per click. Just doesn't seem like them not to
  - kevinschumacher 5y ago
    It could be more of a strategic play to keep eyeballs on Google properties and further build the advertising profile. Also provides a foothold into entering the ordering/delivery/reservation businesses at a much later date if they so choose. IIRC Google didn't take a cut on restaurant reservations, at least
  - jsnell 5y ago
    The article addresses this, with the following quote: > We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature It could of course be a lie, but that seems like a bad strategy.
    - 5y ago
tomohawk 5y ago
How is it not fraud to put in a search term, and have the result NOT be what you searched for, but a paid for middleman site that is making money off the situation. This makes google a shill at best. The middleman is either charging the searcher more to eat at the restaurant, or the restaurant is getting less compensation. Seems pretty evil to me.
joijoi32joi32j 5y ago
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Sounds like usual Google 'organizing the world's information' getting it in trouble again. I mean they're just organizing the links that were scattered across sites and services and SERPs to doordash, ubereats, etc. Seems like the restaurant has a problem with those delivery services more.
CivBase 5y ago
> When users click the “Order Online” button, they’re directed to a page that in many cases contains large links to food delivery companies, complete with their logos. The restaurant’s own site gets a link as well, though it’s a small, generic “website” button. In some cases, Google provides an interface for assembling an order, complete with prices and descriptions of the menu items. > “Google’s ‘Order Online’ button leads to an unauthorized online storefront—one owned and controlled by Google—wherein consumers can place orders for the restaurant’s products, all under the restaurant’s tradename,” the lawsuit says. “Google prominently features the restaurant’s tradename at the top of the page, above the restaurant’s address and menu, to give the user the distinct impression that the storefront and products are authorized and sponsored by the restaurant, when they are not.” I'm not sure if "business fraud" is a thing, but it seems to me like it should be illegal for any business to offer any services on behalf of another business without permission. It's fine if Google displays what it thinks a restaurant's menu is, so long as they aren't pretending to be the restaurant. But taking orders and payment on behalf of another business without their permission is wrong - and using the other business's branding like that is especially twisted.
- jsmith45 5y ago
  I'm really confused by this complaint. If I hit a restaurant's order button I get taken to food.google.com where I am asked to pick a platform to order on, which includes doordash, grubhub, or the restaurants own website (if available). Perhaps if only one of the platforms were available, it would direct me to that provider? (the examples I've tried have all had multiple options). I'm certainly am not seeing this Google controlled storefront thing from the complaint, unless they are claiming the Provider selection screen is a storefront.
- bootlooped 5y ago
  I haven't seen a case yet where the branding is that deceptive. I would like to see it, I'm open to believing it exists. So far, in the examples I've looked at, it has been fairly clear who the players are. I liken it to seeing the logos for car manufacturers on a car rental company's website. I know I'm not entering directly into a transaction with Toyota. I understand that if I search "rent Toyota" on Google a lot of third party services are going to come up in the results.
heisenbit 5y ago
Does Google want to win this? I mean if this is legal what is stopping me to put a front-end before Google and adding my own value add aka. stripping ads?
- josefx 5y ago
  > I mean if this is legal what is stopping me to put a front-end before Google and adding my own value add aka. stripping ads? Google Chrome? I mean they are literally releasing a new version of their browsers plugin API just to break all the ad blockers and privacy plugins. They will probably also find a way to mark your page as malicious (links to all those malware sites,..) or do one of hundreds of other things that will make people avoid your website. They basically own the client, legality only enters the picture when they have to pay a significant amount of fines.
gameswithgo 5y ago
Olo can help restaurants get themselves on Google Food Ordering, and help them create their own online ordering systems, so you can get ahead of the hijackers.
flenserboy 5y ago
Break 'em up. Search, at the very least, needs to be spun off. The problem is that they are too useful as a conglomerate (with their tentacles in everything) for the government to break them up.
yalogin 5y ago
Isn’t this standard pattern all over the industry? Companies essentially hijack the place’s online presence and force a deal with them. That is how all the delivery services boost their signup numbers.
musicale 5y ago
It's annoying when search engines rank third parties above the actual restaurant. I ran into this today.

434 points by JaimeThompson 5y ago

I've seen this when searching for restaurants, and I spotted it right away. It's a classic dark pattern and I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this. Google search results have become dangerous (for lack of a better word) and really hard to use when searching for some things lately. I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me. I understand they want to squeeze every possible dollar out of every search, but I no longer trust them for certain searches. I'm not even talking about the results, this is just what's on the actual Google search results page. There's just way too many ads and other tricks like this happening.

zivkovicp 5y ago
The irony is that these techniques are against their own TOS for Adsense/Adwords, but I guess it's more of a "do as I say, not as I do" sort of situation.
- blakesterz 5y ago
  That reminds me of an old tweet from someone to Matt Cutts (at least I think it was Cutts). MC had tweeted a reply to someone about how they don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites. Someone else replied to him with a screenshot of Google's search results page that had scraped and reused something from somewhere and said "I think I found one of those sites for you". (Hoping I remember that at least somewhat close to how it happened! It's a somewhat faded memory from several years ago)
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Funny, I guess. But pages that scrape short excerpts from other sites and link back to them in order to provide additional value to a user absolutely are allowed by Google. Sites that scrape large portions of text and don't credit it back aren't allowed and would be illegal. An example of an allowed page doing this would be a "recipe roundup" where a site lists 10 or so recipes in a particular theme (like Best Keto Breakfast Recipes) and each one links back to the original recipe with a short description. I'm not surprised this sort of "gotcha" was popular on Twitter though (and is why I don't use Twitter)
    - klyrs 5y ago
      Only, google rarely credits the sources they scraped for infoboxes.
      - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        For things that are considered facts they don't. But for Featured Snippets they do. If something is a widely recognized fact you don't need to credit a source in your own writing too
        squeaky-clean 5y ago
        Google gets "facts" wrong pretty often because it gathers them by scraping. There are too many possible facts for them to have all been verified by a human.
        klyrs 5y ago
        Is some random celebrity's net worth a "widely recognized fact"? https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
        weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        You did not understand my comment - I said Featured Snippets are NOT necessarily facts and DO link to the source. Featured Snippets drive a lot of traffic to sites and as a publisher I instruct my writers on how to craft their sentences to make it more likely we will get a Featured Snippet. Yes, Featured Snippets probably reduced the CTR for pages that were previously ranking #1 but that comes with an increase in user experience. Part of the confusion here stems from the fact you used an ambiguous term like "infobox" that has no real meaning and I interpreted as the box that appears on the sidebar when Googling certain topics (like somebody's name). This typically pulls data from Wikipedia and Wikidata as FACTS. So if by infobox you meant Featured Snippet then your comment was incorrect because Google does in fact always link back the original site (maybe in the last they sometimes didn't? I can't speak to that but I'm doubtful) Also I'll just say this - the website in question in that article was relying on Google for all their traffic for a very particular type of query. That is just stupid. I'm a publisher and wouldn't be able to sleep at night if my site was like theirs. Technically Net Worth is a fact and that's why Google was trying to put it in their Knowledge Graph. But since it's not typically public knowledge it becomes more of an opinion. Hence, it's a Featured Snippet with credit to the source. That site is just mad they don't always get the Featured Snippet so their traffic went down. They weren't complaining when Google was ranking them #1 were they?
  - dazc 5y ago
    That did happen, as you describe it.
  - random314 5y ago
    The top search result was Google scraping from wikipedia.
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    > don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites. I remember there used to be ranking penalties against scraper sites. I have not been following Google's SEO rules in a while, so does anyone know what happened to it?
    - Implicated 5y ago
      It's essentially the 'duplicate content' penalty/penalties. [1] It's pretty ironic really... take a look at this scenario... Let's say we have Website A which we'll consider a "legitimate" website producing unique and quality content and we have Website B which is not, but it has some clever people running it's scrapers/submissions.. Developer responsible for Website B has identified that Website A produces quality content that it wants to steal - setups up a scraper to check for updates on Website A, when it finds them it will immediately scrape the content and repost it on Website B. Then they will update their sitemap and submit it to Google (or some other of the various ways to 'alert' google of a new page/updated content) which will trigger a crawl of that page/website. If this crawl/index of Website B happens before Website A - who does Google see as the producer of that content and who is now the "duplicate"? Whack-a-mole. 1: https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content
resygonewrong 5y ago
I just tried making reservations for an anniversary dinner, so I Google "Obstinate Daughter" and they put up a little widget for Resy and lo and behold there are no good reservations times available despite it being zero-dark-thirty on the first day one could even make reservations for my targeted date. Now I'm a bit skeptical that the city collectively got up at the ass-crack of dawn to make a dinner reservation on a random weeknight, so I go visit the restaurant website and they have a wide open calendar. Had I not scrutinized the Google offerings the restaurant would have lost out on my business. IANAL but that whole offering on the part of Google just seems morally wrong if not some form of fraudulent.
- krnlpnc 5y ago
  So I wonder what's the end game of a pattern like this? Is it a shakedown type of situation where if a restaurant doesn't pay up to enable some reservations "integration" they will be shown as fully booked by default?
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Google does all kinds of stupid things like this. They constantly change how they interpret data and punish anyone who doesn't (or can't) follow the new rules. They'll suddenly require X to be valid against a specific standard, but the maker of the product you sell doesn't follow X. Oh, and omitting X is the same as having an invalid X. Frankly, it's ridiculous. We have to have an entire paid position just for dealing with Google's bullshit.
- zerocrates 5y ago
  As far as I see that restaurant just does in fact use Resy and it looks to me like Google just shows the same results the Resy site does. What they do do is just not show you times that are outside a window around the selected time (and they preselect one) so maybe that's the issue? I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.
djitz 5y ago
Yep. I noticed this when they started doing it in maps. I always wonder what their commission is, which is in turn part of the commission for Grubhub or any other food delivery service. You have to make a real effort to avoid their crap hurdles just to make it to the damn restaurant’s own website.
dvtrn 5y ago
"I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me." I've noticed it only a handful of times, but phone numbers for listings, can't be trusted either anymore [1] GrubHub also does it: there has been more than one occasion where I've searched a restaurant in a new town while traveling for work, called the phone number to inquire about a menu item thinking I was dialing the restaurant but I had instead dialed a GrubHub or Goggle contact center. At first I didn't realize what was going on, but quickly put it together after ordering from a restaurant that appeared in Google, using the "order form" and getting a phone call from a different voice telling me the item I ordered hadn't been sold by the restaurant in weeks due to sourcing issues. "I just spoke with Mark, he said you do sell it" "We don't have anyone named Mark working here" I go check the listing again, check the phone number, and ask the person on the other end of the line what the restaurant business telephone number is: sure enough it's a completely different number. Not sure how widespread this is or how to tell which restaurant phone numbers on these platforms take me to someone actually at the establishment, but....well...shit like this. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-restaurant-phone-numbers-on-yelp.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-res.... (article is from 2019 but this has happened to me as recently as oct/2021)
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Do they actually pretend to be the restaurant on the phone, like they answer with "Tony's Pizza" if that's the restaurant?
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    They did, yes. I’m not qualified to know whether or not this counts as some kind of fraud, but it was the final straw for me to stop using these delivery services once and for all after other unrelated negative experiences with them.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      IANAL, but for the websites, it's easily trademark infringement. In-N-Out notably sued DoorDash over them using the In-N-Out logo on the site.[0] It's understandable why. If a customer receives a bad order due to GrubHub, DoorDash, etc., it reflects badly on the restaurant, even if it's not their fault. See claim 29 from the filing[1]: > Defendant’s use of Plaintiff’s famous trademarks implies that Defendant not only delivers In-N-Out products to its customers, but that the quality and services offered by Defendant is the same as if consumers had made purchases directly from Plaintiff. Upon information and belief, the quality of services offered by Defendant does not at all comport with the standards that consumers expect from Plaintiff’s goods and services. Further, Plaintiff has no control over the time it takes Defendant to deliver Plaintiff’s goods to consumers, or over the temperature at which the goods are kept during delivery, nor over the food handling and safety practices of Defendant’s delivery drivers. While Plaintiff adheres to the Food Code, on information and belief, Defendant does not adhere to such regulations, including with regard to compliance with required food safety and handling practices. [0]: https://money.cnn.com/2015/11/12/technology/in-n-out-doordash-delivery-lawsuit/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/11/12/technology/in-n-out-doordas... [1]: https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-delivery-lawsuit https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...
acomjean 5y ago
I always try to go the website. But I think adding some murk is that some restaurants use third party order systems like by door dash via the generic: https://order.online/en-US/ https://order.online/en-US/ For example this is a doordash site (set up by the restaurant): https://order.online/business/-54797/en-US https://order.online/business/-54797/en-US A restaurant tried to call me about an order, but coming from a toll free number I ignored it. I asked them why they didn't have a local number. They could only call me back via the door dash number as my number wasn't provided to the restaurant. It was weird. Around here the local restaurant POS vendor exposed their interface online and made and app for pickups. I'll use that directly if I'm ordering from a place that uses it. Thats a little fraught too, because the staff has to learn to use that too (staff has to have some training on turing online ordering on or off..which they sometimes have forgotten to do) https://pos.toasttab.com https://pos.toasttab.com
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Remember, that DoorDash is YC13. Ycombinator is enabling this kind of behavior, either historically or currently. I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. And barring active influence, they should outwardly denounce companies that choose to engage in these kinds of scams. (I have a private plugin that does company searches and sees if they are a YC company. You'd be really surprised just how many negative articles are YC founded companies.) Edit: and the downvotes commence
  - david38 5y ago
    Yea, I don’t see YC as any kind of moral filter despite it appears to have that kind of halo.
  - mikestew 5y ago
    I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. Why do you call out YC specifically? Maybe I missed the memo, but I don't look at companies coming out of YC as being made from some special moral fiber. Quite the contrary in a lot of cases, and DoorDash is just one example. If there's anything YC is "auditing", my guess is that it's a P/L sheet, not questionable business decisions.
Unklejoe 5y ago
> I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this. My guess is that most restaurants don’t even know where to begin when it comes to suing something like Google. At least that’s how I would feel.

tpmx 5y ago

I guess it's about https://orderfood.google.com/ https://orderfood.google.com/ (US only, VPN works) + links in organic search results.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xphilter 5y ago

I passed on a case like this years ago -- a restaurant claimed Google hijacked the listing, it turns out they had signed a B2B deal with some food delivery/ordering app that had, in the terms, the right to share this info with others, including Google. Good luck to the restaurant here, but they won't get the same benefit of the doubt consumers (sometimes) get when signing contracts.

grumple 5y ago

This always bothers me. I won't click the "Order Online" button anymore. I'll look for the restaurants website (which often isn't the Website button either) and order directly. If I ran a restaurant, I would never partner with these platforms directly. Let them sell your food, but don't take a loss on the sale just so they can take some profit. I doubt there's much new customer acquisition through these platforms to justify the cost.

soco 5y ago
I already do this for hotel bookings. I'm fed up with Google, Booking.com or whoever trying to trick me into paying them for zero added value.
- anaccountexists 5y ago
  You can’t directly book through Google, if I remember correctly. They’ll kick you out to the business’ site to do that. They’re just an aggregator and get paid in referral fees. The value for you is in the aggregation engine.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  The worst thing about hotel rates is the hotels themselves basically force you to go through a third party unless you want to pay their insane markups. You'd think they'd want you to book directly too...

devmor 5y ago

They have a solid point. I've had a couple different experiences where I clicked on a restaurant on Google Maps and thought I was looking at their official menu - ordered some food and called the restaurant when it never arrived only to find out they never got the order and don't use that delivery service.

akersten 5y ago

At the end of the day do these restaurants not cook and sell the food, or is Google running a secret shadow kitchen and swapping out the cuisine too? If you put a service on the Internet (restaurant website, or making order pickup available from food delivery service), it's going to be consumed. You really have no right to complain about how - Firefox, text based browser, screen reader, printed and physically mailed, or wrapped in another website. Interoperability is a beautiful thing, and if anything, should be made more legal. Your restaurant website probably isn't accessible either. At least Google's is.

ceejayoz 5y ago
No one's asserting they're swapping out the food. I'd bet it's more on the "trademark violation" end of things.
- akersten 5y ago
  > No one's asserting they're swapping out the food. With the amount of vitriol in this thread one wouldn't have been blamed for thinking they were, is my point. We call ourselves Hackers and we're mad about this?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Yes, I'd be mad if someone was using the name of my business to siphon off 30% of my revenue.
    - akersten 5y ago
      To be charged a 30% fee, is part of the business agreement that the restaurant voluntarily entered with that food delivery company though?? I'm gonna leave this thread now, complaining about this is just nuts...
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        > The restaurant voluntarily entered a relationship with that food delivery company though?? In many cases, no. https://www.eater.com/21537215/restaurants-sue-third-party-delivery-service-grubhub-for-listing-businesses-without-permission https://www.eater.com/21537215/restaurants-sue-third-party-d... > Grubhub has explicitly made this false partnership part of their business strategy. Last October, CEO Matt Maloney said the company would be piloting a new initiative of adding more restaurants to its searchable database without entering into an official partnership with them, so customers would believe they had more delivery options with Grubhub, and wouldn’t switch to competitors. Re: your edit... > To be charged a 30% fee... If you don't have a deal with them, they can raise prices to get their cut. Shitty customer experience; they'll likely blame the restaurant for gouging them. Same if they list items not available from an old menu; restaurant gets blamed. There are some funny arbitrage opportunities with the non-consensual listings: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

indymike 5y ago

I pulled the plug on Google Search about two months ago and switched to Brave's new search engine. It works for me. Search is a tough product because nearly every way you come up with to monetize it counts in either diluting the SERPs with paid listings or diverting clicks to something other than what the user is looking for. I.e. I search for a movie and get the Google movie listing instead of a listing for the website for the actual movie. On Brave Search: I've had to use Google search twice in the past month, and it was useful one of those times, so Brave has been fantastic so far. In the past,the new search engine usually lasts about 3-4 days and I give up and go back to Google. This time... well... still using Brave.

Method-X 5y ago
My experience with Brave Search has been fantastic as well. I also like the UI much more than any other search engine I've used.
FearlessNebula 5y ago
Monetization wouldn’t be an issue if we paid for these services. I’d be willing to pay $5-10 a month for a good search engine that respects your privacy. But I guess the average person hates the idea of paying for any software these days.
- Folcon 5y ago
  As much as I subscribe to this perspective, when I think about how much money must be flowing through these ecosystems, I wonder if that's the real price point? I mean theoretically how much would you be willing to pay for search that has no advertisement. $1000 a year? I'm genuinely curious, what would a privacy first non-advertising based approach cost? I mean I suspect you could discount it by not tracking individual users but instead just advertise on results searched, but what does the extreme version of this cost like do you think? What kind of money do we need to put on the table that someone serving it goes, you know what, let's just provide a great search product, if we start trying to mess around with ads / tracking, we're risking killing this golden goose?

notyourday 5y ago

fennecfoxen 5y ago
https://cottonbureau.com/products/its-not-rico https://cottonbureau.com/products/its-not-rico
onion2k 5y ago
I don't think RICO applies, but section 2 of the Sherman Act (abuse of dominant position) might.
- mountainb 5y ago
  Cranks just like bringing up RICO because it is so broad. But the government only uses RICO for the things it wants to, not the random stuff that cranks want the government to do. Most people think that the government is basically like Batman and just sits around waiting to get a call from someone who has found a crime. In reality, society is awash with (think of a random big number) multiples of what the government has the capacity to address, and it picks and chooses the targets that it wants to enforce against.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    RICO isn't broad. The predicate acts of RICO are an explicitly enumerated list (see https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961 for the full list). Then there's the tricky part that the defendant has to be doing that on behalf of a particular enterprise. (See https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/ https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-... for a fuller description). Most internet peanut gallery shouts of "RICO!" are not, in fact, RICO.

naoqj 5y ago

>If the restaurant has a relationship with the food delivery company, it gets charged a fee. These fees can be so high—15 to 30 percent in many cases—that the restaurant has no hope of making a profit from the order. It's Google's fault that the owners of these restaurants don't know how to use Excel?

mring33621 5y ago
It is Google's fault that they are forcing an elderly Thai couple, who have owned a restaurant in Wrigleyville for 20 years, to spend extra time and effort to figure out how to protect their meager profits from internet-based poachers.
- naoqj 5y ago
  That's an appeal to emotion, not a rational argument. Restaurant owners should know the maximum fee that the delivery apps are charging (since they are signing the contract) and adjust prices accordingly. If they are "an elderly Thai couple" (because as we know old people and Thais are idiots) that has managed to reach old age without bankrupting their restaurant, surely they can calculate the impact of the fees of the contracts that they sign on their business.
  - mring33621 5y ago
    How about this then? Many restaurant owners, including the ones I mentioned, are unaware of the existence of these unofficial ordering channels (websites, phone numbers). They claim that they did not sign up for any of this. My wife recently was tricked into calling one of these fake numbers on a fake, but official-looking restaurant website. The person on the other end pretended to be the restaurant that we wanted to order from. But my wife grew suspicious when the person knew nothing about the menu. You keep talking about contracts. But simply saying that 'you signed a contract' does not make it true.
    - naoqj 5y ago
      Are you saying that these restaurants are selling food at 30% discount without even knowing what they are doing? That makes absolutely no sense.

anaccountexists 5y ago

Google is the closest group to the consumer here, but the actual bad actors are DoorDash / GrubHub / etc. The delivery companies add the restaurants to their sites without permission, then Google indexes those pages and provides smart widgets for them. Take away the delivery companies’ bad practices, you take away the Google experience the restaurants don’t like.

krnlpnc 5y ago
No, Google is far from helpless in detection of these types of issues. Business owners should be able to claim and manage the features which are enabled on their accounts, and nothing should be enabled by default beyond the basic contact info and possibly reviews.
rootusrootus 5y ago
If DoorDash and GrubHub are the bad actors, and what they're doing is well enough known that people on HN know about it, why can't Google adjust their algorithms accordingly? Hell, with two big companies like that they could just sanction them directly for subverting the algorithms. I think it makes the most sense to hold Google responsible here since they are in the best position to solve the problem and they're not showing any inclination to do so.
- dontreact 5y ago
  Funny how there is pushback on the YCombinator forum to an attempt to hold accountable a YCombinator company that actually has a direct hand in doing this to restaurants. How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't? The vast majority of these postings are fine/legitimate/consented. Why does it have to be Google that spends time and energy going after the bad actors, and if they don't, they become one? In other words, I really don't see how Google is in the best position to figure out which restaurants have been posted without the restaurant's consent. I think that would be the companies putting up the original post.
  - HWR_14 5y ago

stevespang 5y ago

johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago

Google isn't even in restaurants business and they are already defrauding the restaurants. No wonder people hate Google and love Amazon. Amazon has been doing business with small business and has never taken advantage of them. Meanwhile Google is siphoning money from small restaurants during the pandemic.

jaywalk 5y ago
> Amazon has been doing business with small business and has never taken advantage of them. Oh, wow. I think the countless small businesses that have been essentially forced out by AmazonBasics would disagree with you.
natpalmer1776 5y ago
While it is still under contention, see recent news surrounding the Amazon Basics brands.

lizardactivist 5y ago

Sometimes it seems like Google think the internet is "theirs".

deutschew 5y ago
either they truly have lost touch with their userbase or the large majority of users simply do not care. in any case i'd love to use DDG but the results simply isn't good and I always end up coming back to google. just wish we could give them less information. but seems they are anti-competitive, youtube vanced is another recent example.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  Try Kagi. Free in beta, paid-for in due course, but excellent results.
- P_I_Staker 5y ago
  I hate to say it, but I can't stick with DDG. It's bad enough for my uses, that I have to constantly switch back to google. I know mileage may vary for others.
  - deutschew 5y ago
    same situation, although I recall, there is another search engine that anonymizes your google search....just can't recall what it's called
    - shubhamkrm 5y ago
      It's called startpage.
      - deutschew 5y ago
        yes! weird thing after I installed it, google chrome immediately used a dark pattern to get me to disable it. if I had been a below user average, i would've given up!

endisneigh 5y ago

> On those pages, customers are prompted with large buttons to order with food delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, or Seamless.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I've sometimes wanted to order food ahead of time at local restaurants and pick it up but when I see a poorly branded ordering form on a web site with a generic domain name I've got little faith my order is going to be processed at all, never mind correctly. (... even if it is on the up-and-up there is still the concern that the restaurant doesn't have good processes in place to handle online orders. Years ago I tried online ordering from a local sub shop which handled in-store orders so well one could imagine it being the subject of a business school case study and they screwed up my online order because it didn't fit in their process.) It may really be the restaurant that contracts with some web site to put up an ordering form, maybe the whole thing is a scam. Either way I just don't do it unless I really know online ordering is effective.

robotcookies 5y ago

I had this happen to me. Went to order something for pickup from maps. I thought it was the restaurant's page but the order went through postmates. When I arrived to pick up my order, the staff seemed to think I was an employee of postmates. Anyway, when I got home I did some searching and found out the restaurant had a different webpage from what I ordered from. The prices I paid were a little higher than the actual business websites. It seems postmates charged me more, taking a cut while doing nothing to make the food or deliver it. What a parasitic business to inject yourself as a third party like that.

dawnerd 5y ago
There's been quite a few companies doing some growth hacking, or I guess straight up stealing by putting their url as the url for a restaurant. It's hard to trust anything Google maps tells me since there's no real source of truth. Zomato needs to be banned from Google maps.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  >growth hacking This is just techbro euphemism for "lie to your users."
  - ajhurliman 5y ago
    This particular instance is definitely lying to users, but in general "growth hacking" isn't necessarily so evil. Like adding "sent with Hotmail" at the bottom of the free email service, or offering a printable certificate of your store's Yelp rating to show off to in-person customers.
  - tremon 5y ago
    I thought it was a euphemism for "lie to your investors"?
- i67vw3 5y ago
  Zomato is the worst thing I have seen. I stopped using it and moved to Swiggy. To order from zomato, you need their app, you cannot order from their website. On swiggy, you can either order from their website or app. I like to order stuff of any service from their website. Usually, the play/app store apps are filled with ads, trackers, spyware.

walnutclosefarm 5y ago

Yet another example of the misleading attempts to capture business inquiries by intermediaries. This has long been the case in the hospitality industry, where third party bookers make their ads look so deceptively like you're going to the actual hotel website that I have trouble sorting them out, despite considerable knowledge of their tricks. Ditto insurance - you can't find clean links to Medicare services, or actual ACA insurance exchanges half the time, for the blizzard of brokers' links/ads that appear high in the search results. This is only partly Google's fault though - it's the brokers and other re-intermediaries really fueling it. They ought to be sanctioned along with Google.

specialist 5y ago

If any one has model (draft) legislation to prohibit misc hijacking strategies, please share. I've chatted with my local reps (city & state), who sounded supportive. Figuring out some kind of policy proposal is on my To Do list.

bootlooped 5y ago
It's easy to think of ways this backfires if written too broadly. Such as the record label claiming the local record shop is hijacking their search results and stealing their sales, they want them delisted so searches always go to the record label's online store.
- bogwog 5y ago
  > It's easy to think of ways this backfires if written too broadly. That can (and often is, with unproductive outcomes) be said about everything.
  - immibis 5y ago
    Yes, and that's why politics is hard.

bootlooped 5y ago

The merchant is able to set something on that page, the one with the ordering options, that would label their own website "Preferred by business". If you ever see it, it's fairly prominent. To me this almost totally invalidates the basis for the lawsuit. As an example look up Emmy Squared Pizza: East Village in NYC.

mission_failed 5y ago
'restaurants can choose to opt out of our fraud after we force set up a fake store front' is hardly an argument against a lawsuit

specialp 5y ago

I was just in a coffee shop the other day and a man was telling the clerk he called in an order, and they took it, and he is there to pick it up. The shop had no record of this, and the number that he called was not their number. He said that is really weird, I talked to someone and they took my order. I remembered the dark pattern deployed by GrubHub, and googled the shop. Sure enough the number was the same as the one the man called. The shop had no idea that this was going on, and apparently GrubHub failed to forward that order. This is being done with little or no indication to either party that someone is in the middle.

ascagnel_ 5y ago
Isn't this fraud, on the part of Google, Grub Hub, or both? The customer thinks they're dealing with the business, but one of these two services has MITM'd the service, passing themselves off as the business.
- kuang_eleven 5y ago
  Yes. We should be contacting local attorney generals or equivalent.

impalallama 5y ago

this is disappointing to learn about, i have ordered through these options before, usually for in store pickup so its unfortunate that i'm still using these predatory services that i've been working to avoid

kaslai 5y ago

While this isn't directly Google's doing, they do enable it for other services too: when I was on a road trip, I realized that I was going to need one additional hotel stay before getting home, so at 1 AM I was shopping around for a hotel on my phone and found a place that looked decent enough. I looked up their web page to get their phone number (since I don't trust the Google side-bar) to call them and everything seemed normal enough. I clarified what their pet policy was over the phone and they said I was fine to bring the pets I needed to bring. They said that bringing a large dog and a cat was fine, so I thought everything was good. When I got there, the person handling check-in complained that I was violating hotel policy, as they only allowed one pet and only small dogs were allowed. I was confused as I had specifically asked when booking if they would be allowed and I was assured that it was fine. Thankfully we were allowed to keep the reservation given that we were keeping the animals crated while in the room. When I got home, I compared the phone number in my dial history to the one on the hotel's website, and I noticed that they were different. After a lot of confusion, I tried replicating my steps to navigate to the hotel's website on my phone and realized that I had actually clicked on an "Ad" link on Google to get to the website, rather than the organic result. The webpages were almost identical, with the only difference being the phone number. Presumably the "Ad" link was put up by a booking site to funnel phone traffic away from the legitimate site. Presumably because I was tired, I either didn't notice it was an ad, or I figured that it would be equivalent to the organic search result, but it could have potentially caused me to have to find a hotel that accepts big dogs with vacancy at 11 PM in a city I don't know, in addition to wasting my money since the reservations weren't refundable at that point. tl;dr: Booking sites use Google ads to steal organic traffic intended to go directly to hotels and caused me to unintentionally violate a hotel's pet policy

registeredcorn 5y ago

After reading the entire article, the picture has become a bit clearer. Just to recap the ups and downs of the wishy-washy language these corporate bottomfeeders are using: >We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature. So gogle states that they made this without any intention of compensation. >While The Ordering App was initially set up to take a percentage of sales, Okay, no. So they have* received compensation for this, but intend to never receive profit in the future? >gogle waived it “to help support restaurants affected during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Again, no. So they were* charging, and were collecting exactly the fees they said they weren't, but now they've stopped... "'cuz covid or whatever. See how loving and giving your global overlord is treating its filthy, disgusting peasants? :^)" Basically, gogle waived the fee because they can afford to - for now - and want customers to get accustomed to using it before* they start charging for it (again) after it's reached some predefined metric. How gracious of them to deceive us with such carefully crafted lies. >Companies that have completed the “Order Online” setup with gogle can also direct customers to their own online ordering services. Okay, so this only* impacts companies that want to participate in this stupid online ordering setup? >If restaurants haven’t completed the setup, gogle appears to create a page anyway... Okay, so no. This isn't just people who want to participate. Whether or not a restaurant has any* interest whatsoever in a listing on gogle, their (potential) customers will be given the impression that the restaurant has an online ordering feature. >...It’s unclear how that happens, though it’s possible that a restaurant’s appearance in a delivery app is what triggers it. So, presumably, NO ONE at gogle knows how or why this happens, or at least, no one is unwilling to say how or why this happens because they're whorish enough to keep their scummy mouths shut. So, whether or not a restaurant has ANY intention of working with 3rd parties, those 3rd parties will still try to profit off of restaurants hard work, and potentially drive away business by the higher charges associated with online ordering... >If the restaurant has a relationship with the food delivery company, it gets charged a fee. These fees can be so high—15 to 30 percent in many cases—that the restaurant has no hope of making a profit from the order. ...and if the restaurant actively participates in asinine online ordering, the only thing they can possibly gain out of it is... > “Rather, a restaurant’s usual goal is to capture new customers that may later place orders with the restaurant outside of the Delivery Providers’ expensive platforms.” ...blind hope that, after a customer gets accustomed to purchasing through a very specific means, that suddenly without warning, the customer will then completely change methods into paying a completely different way (in-person, over the phone, etc.) And ultimately, whether or not they play ball with that 3rd party parasite, they're still being listed on that stupid 3rd party website, which in turn is pimping them out to daddy g*ogle for a taste of exposure, which benefits all parties. Except for the restaurant or customer. Yeah, I can see why this resulted in a lawsuit.

kevinschumacher 5y ago

I could be wrong here, but, I think the lawsuit is totally misdirected. Restaurants should be upset with the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) instead. The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent. (Or, perhaps worse, offering orders without restaurant consent?) Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2] I don't think Google even takes a cut! I worked on an integration to a similar API, "Reserve with Google" [3]. With that one, at least, it can be enabled/disabled at the restaurant level. I assume that "Order with Google" is similar. [1] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering [2] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering/guides/build/integration-steps https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering/guides/b... [3] https://www.google.com/maps/reserve/ https://www.google.com/maps/reserve/

ptudan 5y ago
I would be shocked if google didn't get a cut, or at least a pay per click. Just doesn't seem like them not to
- kevinschumacher 5y ago
  It could be more of a strategic play to keep eyeballs on Google properties and further build the advertising profile. Also provides a foothold into entering the ordering/delivery/reservation businesses at a much later date if they so choose. IIRC Google didn't take a cut on restaurant reservations, at least
- jsnell 5y ago
  The article addresses this, with the following quote: > We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature It could of course be a lie, but that seems like a bad strategy.
  - 5y ago

tomohawk 5y ago

How is it not fraud to put in a search term, and have the result NOT be what you searched for, but a paid for middleman site that is making money off the situation. This makes google a shill at best. The middleman is either charging the searcher more to eat at the restaurant, or the restaurant is getting less compensation. Seems pretty evil to me.

joijoi32joi32j 5y ago

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Sounds like usual Google 'organizing the world's information' getting it in trouble again. I mean they're just organizing the links that were scattered across sites and services and SERPs to doordash, ubereats, etc. Seems like the restaurant has a problem with those delivery services more.

CivBase 5y ago

> When users click the “Order Online” button, they’re directed to a page that in many cases contains large links to food delivery companies, complete with their logos. The restaurant’s own site gets a link as well, though it’s a small, generic “website” button. In some cases, Google provides an interface for assembling an order, complete with prices and descriptions of the menu items. > “Google’s ‘Order Online’ button leads to an unauthorized online storefront—one owned and controlled by Google—wherein consumers can place orders for the restaurant’s products, all under the restaurant’s tradename,” the lawsuit says. “Google prominently features the restaurant’s tradename at the top of the page, above the restaurant’s address and menu, to give the user the distinct impression that the storefront and products are authorized and sponsored by the restaurant, when they are not.” I'm not sure if "business fraud" is a thing, but it seems to me like it should be illegal for any business to offer any services on behalf of another business without permission. It's fine if Google displays what it thinks a restaurant's menu is, so long as they aren't pretending to be the restaurant. But taking orders and payment on behalf of another business without their permission is wrong - and using the other business's branding like that is especially twisted.

jsmith45 5y ago
I'm really confused by this complaint. If I hit a restaurant's order button I get taken to food.google.com where I am asked to pick a platform to order on, which includes doordash, grubhub, or the restaurants own website (if available). Perhaps if only one of the platforms were available, it would direct me to that provider? (the examples I've tried have all had multiple options). I'm certainly am not seeing this Google controlled storefront thing from the complaint, unless they are claiming the Provider selection screen is a storefront.
bootlooped 5y ago
I haven't seen a case yet where the branding is that deceptive. I would like to see it, I'm open to believing it exists. So far, in the examples I've looked at, it has been fairly clear who the players are. I liken it to seeing the logos for car manufacturers on a car rental company's website. I know I'm not entering directly into a transaction with Toyota. I understand that if I search "rent Toyota" on Google a lot of third party services are going to come up in the results.

heisenbit 5y ago

Does Google want to win this? I mean if this is legal what is stopping me to put a front-end before Google and adding my own value add aka. stripping ads?

josefx 5y ago
> I mean if this is legal what is stopping me to put a front-end before Google and adding my own value add aka. stripping ads? Google Chrome? I mean they are literally releasing a new version of their browsers plugin API just to break all the ad blockers and privacy plugins. They will probably also find a way to mark your page as malicious (links to all those malware sites,..) or do one of hundreds of other things that will make people avoid your website. They basically own the client, legality only enters the picture when they have to pay a significant amount of fines.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Olo can help restaurants get themselves on Google Food Ordering, and help them create their own online ordering systems, so you can get ahead of the hijackers.

flenserboy 5y ago

Break 'em up. Search, at the very least, needs to be spun off. The problem is that they are too useful as a conglomerate (with their tentacles in everything) for the government to break them up.

yalogin 5y ago

Isn’t this standard pattern all over the industry? Companies essentially hijack the place’s online presence and force a deal with them. That is how all the delivery services boost their signup numbers.

musicale 5y ago

It's annoying when search engines rank third parties above the actual restaurant. I ran into this today.