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Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

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Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#171

Post by keymone »

criddell wrote: post #111
timr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ah the irony. Yelp is the same website that bullied small businesses to pay for positive reviews" No, Yelp is accused of this. Nobody has ever shown it to be true. (I can also tell you, as someone who worked there, that it definitely is not true, but you don't have to take my word for it. You just have to not confuse accusations with facts.)

I came here looking for claims like these. It always has baffled me the number of first hand accounts of Yelp salesperson shenanigans with no documented examples. What do you think is the root of the accusations? Do yelp salespeople promise things they can't deliver?

there are a lot of businesses on yelp. some of them are bound to suck. blaming somebody else is the easiest option and yelp is the easiest target.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#172

Post by thezilch »

mdasen wrote: post #22
mrunkel wrote: post #13

I find all this hand wringing over Google to be so tiring. Google is doing what is best for it's customers. Be that advertisers and/or searchers. 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…

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape. It is ok to be dominant in a prod…

Can you provide a specific issue?

If I put a competitor (eg. yelp, angie[slist], etc) into my search query, I get only results for those competitors. Leave the qualifying term out, and I get a SERP of all non-Google review sites. But again, I enter "yelp pizza" and get all Yelp results. Hell, I enter "pizza reviews" and get Yelp as the top 3 links of my SERP.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#173

Post by sangnoir »

wbillingsley wrote: post #143
criddell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing me and it pretty much comes down to trust. I trust Google a lot more than I ever trusted Microsoft back when they were the bully.

Which seems foolish. Microsoft just dictated the format your save file was in. Google ensures that by default most users never have their own data to load into another product at all. You seem to trust them because they have their hands around your throat rather than just your wrist.

> Which seems foolish

I'm yet to see any malicious actions by Google that comes close to the Halloween Documents or the licensing shenanigans. I don't know if you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but at it's peak, Microsoft was capital-E Evil (or ruthless if you're against moralizing): comparing Microsoft then to Google today seems foolish to me.

Edit: I naively think Google works with the principle that "What's good for the web is good for Google" and works to improve the web (and to my benefit). 90's Microsoft principle was "What's good for Microsoft is good for Microsoft. Destroy anyone who tries to mess with that"

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#174

Post by nl »

thezilch wrote: post #172
mdasen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape. It is ok to be dominant in a prod…

Can you provide a specific issue? If I put a competitor (eg. yelp, angie[slist], etc) into my search query, I get only results for those competitors. Leave the qualifying term out, and I get a SERP of all non-Google review sites. But again, I enter "yelp pizza" and get all Yelp results. Hell, I enter "pizza reviews" and get Yelp as the top 3 links of my SERP.

If I search for "9000 shimano derailleur" on Google, the top infobox link is "Shop for 9000 shimano derailleur on Google".

This links to the Google comparison shopping site, which Google receives affiliate income for. The Google comparison shopping site is ok, but no better than many others.

I generally like the work Google does, but I think that there are some questions around using their dominant position in organic web search to move into a new market. To be clear, I'm not absolutely opposed to this, but I can see problems.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#175

Post by programmernews3 »

timr wrote: post #68
parthdesai wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." Ah the irony. Yelp is the same website that bullied small businesses to pay for positive reviews[1]. [1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bus...

"Ah the irony. Yelp is the same website that bullied small businesses to pay for positive reviews" No, Yelp is accused of this. Nobody has ever shown it to be true. (I can also tell you, as someone who worked there, that it definitely is not true, but you don't have to take my word for it. You just have to not confuse accusations with facts.)

Trustpilot is the new kid on the block for the review shakedown, blackmail as a service provider

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#176

Post by ekianjo »

oh_sigh wrote: post #153
ekianjo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but by default you get Chrome, which is about the same thing people were fighting Microsoft over in the Netscape-IE days, but this time on Android.

The difference being that Apple has a huge percentage of the market share and Android isn't the only game in town.

Apple only has a significant share in a few geographies, for the most part the world has turned to Android already.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#177

Post by criddell »

keymone wrote: post #171
criddell wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for claims like these. It always has baffled me the number of first hand accounts of Yelp salesperson shenanigans with no documented examples. What do you think is the root of the accusations? Do yelp salespeople promise things they can't deliver?

there are a lot of businesses on yelp. some of them are bound to suck. blaming somebody else is the easiest option and yelp is the easiest target.

I was thinking more about the reports that Yelp salespeople suggest that they can clean up bad reviews.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#178

Post by ClassyJacket »

keymone wrote: post #34
ClassyJacket wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. Yelp adds no value the dozens of other review apps don't, they simply succed because they extort and blackmail small businesses. I refuse to install their app and the quicker they die the better.

> they extort and blackmail small businesses do you have any evidence of this?

Hundreds of first hand accounts

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2segh5/yelp_accused_o...

Plus everything in Billion Dollar Bully.

It's fact at this point.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#179

Post by curun1r »

annexrichmond wrote: post #92
curun1r wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 The same basic thing could be said for most of Yelp's customers. Many would prefer that Yelp not exist or not index them but are forced to buy expensive plans with Yelp to have some measure of control over thei…

> but are forced to buy expensive plans with Yelp to have some measure of control over their public profile what evidence do you have to suggest that (a) business owners are forced to buy plans from Yelp (b) there's a strong correlation between business owners who don't pay Yelp and are not successful? I'm pretty sure these have been debunked[1] but if you have data I'd like to see it. in spite of this, even if you p…

Data, no. But I worked at a company that built a product for small business marketing/reputation. So I and my colleagues there spoke to hundreds of different small businesses and it was a recurring theme. My team actually worked on an integration with Yelp, so we had discussions with customers specifically on that topic. At one point, we asked our success team (a team that called customers once per month to proactively help with issues they might be having) to look for customers who were also happy Yelp customers as potential beta testers of our integration. In their first two weeks of calls, they didn't find any happy Yelp customers among the ~18,000 of our customers they called. They eventually found two among the other half of our customer base, but seeing that it was literally 2 out of thousands led me to my point of view.

Of course, it doesn't absolve Google of their tactics. I only mentioned it because it seems like a pot-kettle situation to me. My company actually had its own problems with Google. At one point, Google switched from displaying reviews that we collected and syndicated to them on search results to hiding them behind a "X more reviews on ..." link. I believe it was when Google started collecting their own reviews, but it was before my time there. It almost killed the company and made our offering significantly less valuable.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#180

Post by ionised »

themacguffinman wrote: post #94
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Search for a start. Youtube is effectively standing alone in the space. Google Maps is completely dominating the space (in particular there is nothing that replaces the Earth product or the parts of Earth in maps). Gmail is taking over the world over here. Most local mail solutions are irrelevant at this point and the only real alternative to gmail even intentionally is outlook now. Chrome effectively took out…

Right, but unless you are accusing Google of foul play, their market dominance is just evidence of the superior consumer value they provide. In other words, they are doing what is best for its customers. The question of this thread is: did Google unfairly push out their competition. If you can't argue that, then this is just pointless Google hand wringing.

> their market dominance is just evidence of the superior consumer value they provide.

I don't think that's true.

They leveraged their search engine dominance to push Chrome on people with banners stating that the user experience would be better on Chrome.

They bundled the Chrome installer with a load of other app installers and users would immediately find themselves with a new, default browser, because Google knew most users never explore advanced installer options to discover they needed to opt-out.

Google maps is far worse than OSM and HereMaps in my opinion, but it is far more pervasive because it is the go-to mapping service when users perform a search.

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