11–20 of 198 posts
"Jeremy Stoppelman @jeremys Wow Google, congrats on a new low. Consumer searches for Yelp gets "reviews" which are Google Ads." hah, that's fresh coming from an online racketeering company.
Interestingly, the other firms cited in the article as taking up the Google fight are Microsoft and Oracle, which both have had their antitrust issues. This definitely looks like a case of "well, we got in trouble for this, so they should get their come-upings too!".
So like, today I would consider Microsoft an ally against the current monopoly party, but I have no doubt that Microsoft would return to their old ways if they were on top again.
If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance.
Last I checked, nobody is forced to use google to search for things, nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome.
I'm not a laissez-faire capitalist by any means, but I don't see that Google has an unfair monopoly. They have achieved their dominance because their services are viewed as "best" by the majority of folks out there.
Nobody complains when Google suddenly starts delivering more customers to their web properties, only if traffic suddenly dies out.
They are saying that a website must conform to their idea of a search page which contains only plain text search results.
However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".
The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.
Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.
(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )
Unrelated but related, what is it like to work at Yelp? I was recently contacted by them for a position but it didn't inspire confidence. The mention of a "shoestring operation" in this article is making me believe I made the right choice.
Unrelated but related, what is it like to work at Yelp? I was recently contacted by them for a position but it didn't inspire confidence. The mention of a "shoestring operation" in this article is making me believe I made the right choice.
Their SF headquarters is a standard silicon valley playground. I'm not sure why the author tried to differentiate Yelp from regular SF/Silicon Valley companies by only mentioning its drab satellite office
"Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time." That sums it up for Yelp and many others, myself included. Combine that reality with the black box that Google is, in many ways, and you have an inaccessible behemoth who's decisions decide the fate of many. G…