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

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

#61

Post by spyhi »

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #30
telltruth wrote: post #19

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 Googl…

> 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…

> 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-re... [2] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-rev... [3] https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove-negative-reviews-in-e...

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

#62

Post by Mirioron »

camillomiller wrote: post #53
sunstone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yelp has been horrible since day one. If google has or has not abused its position Yelp is not the standard we would use to determine that.

This makes no sense. Yelp could be the worst company ever created, but if they had market share and Google worked to seize that market with unfair practices, that counts as abuse of dominant position. There is a dangerous conflation of two very distinct categories in your line of thought.

The problem comes with the fact that it's possible to game algorithms. We have examples where a poor service or website becomes (remains) popular, because they're good at gaming the system. Eg Pinterest.

Or in the case of the example they brought up in the video, where they counted the number of reviews you could game that system by just creating fake reviews or trying to just get more of them through non-organic ways.

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

#63

Post by nostalgeek »

mozumder wrote: post #46
greggman wrote: post #38

Yelp is crying sour grapes here. There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there? They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad. They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes. Following up on the last idea…

Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.

> Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.

I'm not sure what the problem is, in both cases reviews are crowd-sourced. So what level of professionalism are you expecting from websites where anybody can leave a review?

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

#65

Post by xapata »

eganist wrote: post #52
kolleykibber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 wh…

Which platform is better varies by city, I've found.

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

#66

Post by xapata »

latenightcoding wrote: post #41

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

They struck deals with a number of job sites to get that data. It's not as one-sided as it might seem.

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

#67

Post by dazc »

camillomiller wrote: post #39
greggman wrote: post #38

Yelp is crying sour grapes here. There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there? They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad. They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes. Following up on the last idea…

You might be right, but a company’s abuse of dominant position isn’t defined by the quality of their competitor’s offer.

But, maybe, abusing a dominant position is a lot easier when the competitor's offer is so poor?

For a lot of popular queries the results are dominated by paid directories, aggregators and such that offer no great value to consumers.

Google's listings tend to be more accurate in terms of location and the reviews more reliable.

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

#68

Post by dazc »

Mirioron wrote: post #62
camillomiller wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense. Yelp could be the worst company ever created, but if they had market share and Google worked to seize that market with unfair practices, that counts as abuse of dominant position. There is a dangerous conflation of two very distinct categories in your line of thought.

The problem comes with the fact that it's possible to game algorithms. We have examples where a poor service or website becomes (remains) popular, because they're good at gaming the system. Eg Pinterest. Or in the case of the example they brought up in the video, where they counted the number of reviews you could game that system by just creating fake reviews or trying to just get more of them through non-organic way…

'Eg Pinterest'

A classic example of a business that Google should be using their dominance against, but aren't.

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

#69

Post by hueving »

telltruth wrote: post #48
annexrichmond wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 otherw…

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…

>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.

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

#70

Post by dazc »

mozumder wrote: post #46
greggman wrote: post #38

Yelp is crying sour grapes here. There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there? They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad. They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes. Following up on the last idea…

Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.

I wouldn't say Google reviews are ideal but I've found them to be a lot more reliable than the alternative.

For example, Booking.com, etc.

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