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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."
You'll probably get marked as "Troll", although what you say is completely true.
Recommendation sites like that are nearly useless. The last time I tried it, somebody recommended a fancy and expensive restaurant and raved about how great the food was. My wife and I went, and the food was utter shit. Extremely small portions, way the fuck too expensive, and it didn't even taste good.
Then we checked another restaurant that we like, and found numerous negative recommendations that didn't correspond at all to the hundreds of times we'd been there.
People's tastes just differ too much to make sites like these useful.
"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?
No. Reminds me of QR Codes which are very common in Japan, as most phones can read them, and extract some info like a URL.
Yeah I've often wondered what the world will be like when Google has a new CEO.
One that likes profits. And instant gratification.
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).
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.
Except for their attempts to extort advertising from the businesses who's sites they have reviews of.
I had 11 positive reviews and one "eh" review, they called me and asked me for money, I refused and 4 of my good reviews disappeared completely and three bad reviews appeared all within the space of four days of their call.
The best part was that two of the bad reviewers had obviously never been to my business, the things they talked about are completely wrong.
Yelp is a scam, it had potential but at this point it's just a scam.
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.