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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

#101

Post by polyomino »

deanCommie wrote: post #74
mozumder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is completely Anecdotal, but, as a foodie, I find the Google reviews have a higher aggregate "crowd wisdom" than Yelp. I am constantly shocked by the lack of correlation between rating and quality in the restaurants I look up on yelp. Before it died, UrbanSpoon was better than Yelp too. TripAdvisor is the worst because it's 99% tourists, so you never get a local's opinion of what's good in their area. Just my 2…

Google reviews have orders of magnitute higher counts compared to yelp throughout Europe and likely elsewhere outside the US.

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

#102

Post by ghaff »

notyourday wrote: post #97
ghaff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if any of this is carryover from Zagat but I tend to agree. Zagat was quirky in its own way with the brief summations of crowdsourced (before that was a term) comments on restaurants--but, because it was definitely oriented toward foodies, I found it very reliable. I do find Yelp better than throwing darts at a dartboard. But especially if reviews are thin or the restaurant caters to the sports bar crowd…

Zagat had enormous grade inflation. There were even studies done on it - unfortunately the name of the paper currently escapes me and googling only provides explanation of why it is happening rather than the data source. Yelp's biggest issue is Yelp Elite crowd. It wields sufficient power in local markets that people want to belong to it and in order to belong one does not just need to review lots of places, one need…

>Zagat had enormous grade inflation.

Yes, but so does pretty much every rating system of this type. Most 3-star items on Amazon aren't very good. [1]

Back when they used a 30 point system, I found that anything above 21 or so on Zagat was almost always pretty decent. Yelp seems to be around 4-star+ with less consistency.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1098/

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

#103

Post by dalbasal »

mratzloff wrote: post #90
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…

Craigslist is terrible but people still use it. If Google entered that market and showed their own classified ads as search results above Craigslist's, would you say that "Craigslist couldn't see their audience was going to dry up"? At what point is it too much? Google wants to classify all the world's information—doesn't seem like there are many markets it wouldn't enter. Is every business just living on borrowed ti…

This was a big scare 10-12 years ago.

Google will eat the world. Whether you were selling an RSS client or giving away a social network, the fear was that Google could take your whole market sector.

How? Google search is the way customers find you, initially and every time they want to log in. If they want to compet, all the customers already have google accounts and they're already logged in. Google has useful customer data: "you are in a restaurant now and often visit yelp, do you want to write a review?"

Lean on 2 or 3 of these advantages, and Google can have a yelp-killer sketched out in an afternoon and built in a quarter.

In reality, Google didn't really eat everything. The web was just too big. They also sucked at some stuff like new communication or social network paradigms (wave, plus hangouts). But, Google's bigger now. Theyve eaten most of the big dishes. Yelp might still be too small a snack, but... the point about dominance is true. Google have a lot of power. If they want into some web sector, they can just power through the marketing & chicken-egg problems that kill 92.6% of the competition.

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

#104

Post by andrepd »

dalbasal wrote: post #77
camillomiller wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are right, at least in the traditional anti-trust-ish legal sense as I understand it. In a wider more pedestrian sense, there is a some kettle-pot-black involved here, at least in my opinion. Yelp's a little monopolistic middle man. Everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp because everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp. Market dominance today is the main ingredient for dominance tomorrow. Everyone uses Google…

For what's worth, I never used Yelp in my life. I seem to only remember using Tripadvisor.

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

#105

Post by lithos »

mratzloff wrote: post #90
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…

Craigslist is terrible but people still use it. If Google entered that market and showed their own classified ads as search results above Craigslist's, would you say that "Craigslist couldn't see their audience was going to dry up"? At what point is it too much? Google wants to classify all the world's information—doesn't seem like there are many markets it wouldn't enter. Is every business just living on borrowed ti…

Craigslist is actually pretty good for some users. It works on a computer that is over 10 years old, it has minimum levels of moderation, and does a really good job of letting people interact/trade in their local areas.

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

#106

Post by mark_l_watson »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

60 Minutes didn't reveal anything here a lot of us don't already know, there wasn't any hard-hitting journalism or incredible revelations. But given 60 Minutes reaches millions of people, it's probably massively raised awareness of these issues with a significant number of people who don't generally follow tech explicitly.

60 Minutes lost me as a viewer 25 years ago.

They did a hit piece on someone who I worked with that was flat out untrue. Many people at work knew the details and agreed. That one experience made me view anything I see on TV with a healthy dose of scepticism.

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

#107

Post by mieseratte »

krn wrote: post #64

When I want to buy something, I type "amazon.com", not "google.com". So, why don't I type "yelp.com", when I want to go somewhere? There is nothing to complain about, when your product sucks.

> When I want to buy something, I type "amazon.com", not "google.com".

I do the exact opposite, I either search a specific business' site or Google something vague like "sturdy cargo pants," find a brand / store that I like and visit that store.

I've been burned too many times by cheap, fake shit from Amazon. I'm not willing to deal with the hassle and wasted time.

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

#108

Post by zeusk »

xapata wrote: post #66
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.

Until they no longer need that data because they "harvest" it themselves.

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

#109

Post by sctb »

justonepost wrote: post #79

lol, here comes the googlers upvote/downvoting. Dang, are you doing anything about that?

> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#110

Post by dagw »

xapata wrote: post #65
eganist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone should make a meta-service which searches different review sites depending on where you're searching and what you're looking for.
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