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Google In Talks To Buy Yelp
There have been many rumors floating around concerning a possible buyout of Yelp by Google, but it appears that at least a few details have escaped, painting this as a much more serious possibility. Pointing the needle to something north of $500 million, the acquisition would mean a substantial step into localized business for Google. "Google has been showing greater interest in the local business market in the United States. It has expanded its profile pages for local businesses, which include location and hours, maps and reviews from other Web sites. In June, Google gave local businesses the ability to manage what people see on their profile pages, similar to what Yelp does. Google has been reaching out to local businesses with simpler ways to advertise on the search engine. It is also distributing stickers that businesses post in their windows and passers-by can scan with cellphones to get coupons or information about the business. The deal between Google and Yelp could still unravel, one person said, particularly if another acquirer comes forward now that details have leaked."
CueCat?
Google is just going to buy the internet.
and then hopefully they'll just delete it
most posts are friends of the business owner or simply whiners.
I'm sure the EU will have something to say about this.
THL phish sticks
$ yelp --help
Usage:
yelp [OPTION...] GNOME Help Browser
Help Options:
-?, --help Show help options
--help-all Show all help options
--help-gtk Show GTK+ Options
--help-bonobo-activation Show Bonobo Activation options
--help-gnome Show GNOME options
--help-gnome-session Show session management options
Application Options:
-p, --private-session Use a private session
--with-cache-dir Define which cache directory to use
--display=DISPLAY X display to use
"It is also distributing stickers that businesses post in their windows and passers-by can scan with cellphones to get coupons or information about the business. "
The business could just do free wifi w/the info on the "accept" page.
It's not like I'm going to have a signal anyway, regardless of what A morbidly obese Luke Wilson tells me.
500 million for a very simple website that has people reviewing restaurants and shit? Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).
What is this world coming to?
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
...to have progress, the people of earth will have to start owning the search and everything else that Google is into nowadays. Today most people probably think Google is doing a good job (and I'm not saying they aren't), but Google will become a middle man that we'd be better off without. The surfers should be in control of the means of searching. I hope the transition will go smoothly and painlessly.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Of course people's tastes differ, but yelp can give you a ton of information from a bunch of different perspectives; sure it's a challenge to sort through it all but if you just read the first review and treat as gospel of course you will be disappointed. But if you look at negative and positive reviews and use them to learn about the restaurant (rather than just about someone's opinion of the restaurant) it can be really helpful. After a while you can "friend" reviewers whose comments you find informative and you can ignore those you don't. You can even look at menus and photos of the food; many restaurants have extensive photo albums contributed by users. And, best of all, you can contribute to this information -- if you have a favorite restaurant that is getting trashed by various reviewers, you can post responses.
Is it monopolistic or anti-competitive when Google does it? Will we put Borg implants on Larry Page's face?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Meanwhile the rest of the world will be grateful that Google will not try to extort them for ad revenue to get a good rating.
I wrote a review on Yelp once. It was very unfavorable towards what was probably the worst restaurant I have ever eaten at. The only other review was glowing (I'm assuming the restaurant owner wrote it). Yelp deleted my unfavorable review (which, I should add, contained no offensive material, obvious flames, or anything else that could warrant a deletion).
In short, this is a bad idea. A website that seems to get revenue from censorship bribes is not a sustainable enterprise (and yes, I realize I'm making a major assumption here).
Yelp gets amazing ranking on all of the search engines, and it also has a huge user base of people who are happy to offer reviews for free. Google wants both of these: high page rank that can drive advertising income, and users who are dumb enough to post reviews for free.
A Yelp killer would give the top moderated reviewers a piece of the pie.
.. one of the things that makes us yelp: http://www.twentysteps.com/images/goorex.jpg
Welp it was bound to happen.
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
Yes. It's offering a social networking site for such people as well as a user-generated database of information about the restaurants (and other businesses) in their neighborhoods. It's like facebook meets wikipedia for food and drink nerds. It's incredibly useful in a large city where new restaurants and bars come and go constantly, and where there is a large mobile population of internet-savvy people with disposable income. People post photos and the reviews range from entirely vapid to densely informative. It's an opportunity for every wannabe food critic to write about what they love (or hate) and actually get readers without having to go pro ... (It's especially useful in a city like LA where print food journalism is already dominated by a single writer!) You can learn a lot about places that you would never get from a menu or the website or a newspaper review. It's not just restaurants, either -- bars, auto mechanics, bowling alleys, doctors, strip clubs, medical marijuana "dispensaries," and universities all have extensive pages of reviews. And you can network with writers you think are helpful or entertaining. Some networks organize parties and group dining events. It's great for travelers too -- I really like to eat out at izakayas (Japanese "tapas" pubs), for example; whenever I travel anywhere in the US that has some Japanese population, I always check yelp to find such places and read their reviews. I don't know if google owning yelp will be good or bad - I kind of like it the way it is now, though I could see its potential to be much cooler. Either way, though, people who use it regularly see a lot of value in it and I'm guessing that google sees a lot of value in those networks of generally young, educated hipsters with enough money to go out to eat all the time and enough free time to spend generating content (for free).
Now Bing has to buy something. But what? Local.com? Does Microsoft already have a recommendation service somewhere in its Live system?
who buys all kinds of crap without knowing what he's going to do with it.
I can't remember where I read it - it may have even been linked here on slashdot - exposing Yelp's sales tactics to restaurants advertising on the site. Basically, they were guaranteed no adverse ratings and higher ranking in searches.
I think Yelp is a good idea gone wrong considering the exposé. If only they'd found a less sleazy way of getting restaurants signed up.
anti-competitive maybe, but if you think this is just about copying code, you're missing the point. When yuppies in NY, Chicago, LA, SF, NOLA, Vegas, and other cities in the U.S. get home from a great (or terrible) meal (or strip club or trip to the gynecologist), many of them want to "yelp" their experiences. They don't say "I am going to run home and google map the shit out of this place!" Reviews on google maps are useful but they are not really part of a social network; they are far more anonymous and disposable than yelp reviews. You don't "favorite" authors, you don't upload photos of your food (or photos of yourself), and you don't join groups of other users for sushi or whatever in real live fleshmeets. Yelp has just done the "Web 2.0" experience a lot more elegantly than google in this area. I suspect google doesn't just want the user base but also their sense of connectedness to each other.
Yelp is not just code; it's an actual social network and it's a brand identity. I don't know if it's worth a half billion either -- those kind of numbers are meaningless to me since I don't buy and sell companies. But it's certainly something a hell of a lot more substantial than its codebase.
you should go yelp about it!
A few others have made the same remarks. I figured I'd fire back with my own yelp experience from a business side.
We've always been reviewed favorably on yelp. Then earlier this year a competitor decided to get in on the yelp gaming action. This competitor had all of their buddies go out and write unfavorable reviews of us. The review would always go like this..
"Toqers business sucks because of
ABCDEFG
Oh and since they suck, you should to to
X"
X being, a location ran by our competitor. Most of the negative reviews were written by folks with 1 or 2 reviews, no real name or picture. The name and picture thing is important in yelp culture because it's "Real Reviews, by Real People"
Around the same time we started getting calls from yelp salespeople promising if we paid them some outrageous monthly sum, they would make the default sort on our page descending. That way we get all the 5 star reviews first. When we declined somehow the choicest negative reviews floated towards the top.
So we struck back..
I started recruiting my regular customers to start writing their own reviews. My competitor cried foul. I told him I was bringing yelp new users, and there was nothing wrong with that. Me having my customers write good reviews was no worse than him having his friends write false/negative ones.
One of my customers even went as far as to write a review containing a bunch of links to youtube videos. My competitor had said that we were an unlively establishment full of ugly people, and the youtube videos proved that to be completely false.
The flagging wars
So my competitor flagged the review with the youtube links citing yelp policy that "Offsite linking should be limited" That review got taken down. We fired back flagging reviews and citing yelp policy as well. Our competitor made the mistake of writing updates that "Are not new experiences" For example, one girl who became the girlfriend of the leader of these folks initially gave us a great review. When she started getting deep dicked she wrote an update review about how shitty we were. Technically she didn't have a new experience, so she got flagged, review removed. For a while every morning was spent dealing with this bullshit. I tried going through regular yelp channels and it was of no help. I begged yelp "Just take us off your service". They quoted DMCA safe harbor laws. I got sick of it, so I started dropping dox on reviewers, Jeremy Stoppleman, other Yelp Big wigs, etc. Me and some of our regulars started having our own version of photoshop Friday, pasting the faces of some of these douchebags on gay porn and what not. Sure it was childish, but we decided we to could hide behind "DMCA Safe Harbor". Fuck em.
I don't know for sure if that worked, but the slurry of negative reviews stopped. The sort order on our yelp page suddenly changed. The owners son of the business I work at asked me to take down our photoshop friday and dox. Now it seems like we just have a cease fire.
We haven't been asked by yelp again if we want to join their program. Yelp is really sleazy, to me it seems like they condoned our competitors behavior just to pressure us into giving them money.
A lot of old time yelp regulars are giving up on yelp. Even AT&T has given up on them. In their last "Does your network do this?" Iphone commercial, they say "Find a great restaurant" That segment used to feature yelp, but now features Zagat.
If you google "Yelp is a scam" you will find many many websites supporting this. Google please don't make the mistake of buying yelp.
Actually, it was earlier this year in the East Bay Express .
Dog is my co-pilot.
I've had two reviews deleted that were "unfavorable" from Yelp. These weren't just "I don't like this" bland reviews, but critiquing service, food, etc. justifying 1 or 2 star ratings.
Yelp was made by consumers that were willing to write the feedback. Would they get a pie out of this deal?
Chowhound.com was the best restaurant review site on the web until they were acquired (and basically destroyed via redesign by CBS Interactive).