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Yelp's Six-Year Grudge Against Google (nytimes.com)
Yelp has become Google's most tenacious pest, and despite the public outcries the crowd-sourced reviews website has seen little mercy over the years. From an NYTimes article: For six years, Jeremy Stoppelman's (chief executive of Yelp) company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp's larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. He has testified before Congress, written op-ed columns and used Twitter to bash Google's behavior (paywalled). Google wasn't always a rival. At one point, it was a suitor. But out of that union that never happened was born a mighty grudge, perhaps even an obsession. At one point, Yelp held a hackathon to create a sort of alternate-universe Google, the better for it to explain Google's ways to regulators. And then you have Luther Lowe. Mr. Lowe, Yelp's vice president for government relations, once spent $3,000 on a stuffed elephant, because it had been knit by Europe's antitrust chief. Unlike Google, whose office is full of artwork and free food, Yelp's Washington presence is just a rented co-working space. So Mr. Lowe keeps the elephant at Yelp's San Francisco headquarters, where there is more room. "This is a shoestring operation," he said. But after years of trying and failing, that operation has finally landed a good punch. Last Tuesday, the European Union fined Google $2.7 billion -- the largest antitrust fine in its history -- for unfairly favoring its own services over those of its rivals. The fine was related to Google's shopping service, so strictly speaking it had nothing to do with the Yelp-Google dispute, which is part of a separate investigation into local search. Still, Yelp and other American technology companies pushed hard to get regulators to issue a bold condemnation of Google's behavior toward competitors, signing a letter that accused Google of "destroying jobs and stifling innovation." And by affirming that Google is the dominant company in online search -- something most people take for granted -- Tuesday's decision is likely to help Yelp's case.
I see Yelp quite often in Google search results.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
yelp is still a thing? was it ever a thing? who besides some greedy bastards and misguided k0d3rs cared about it?
We want to be bought by Google.
That's it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If it was good enough, people would know about it.
"A shoestring operation"
Which basically says - no real marketing/advertising. - so you won't see them unlike people such as uber.
So yes, sounds very much like a grudge match. Pretty sad one at that. People will go to the best product. Open it up, let people invest time and effort into it and see where it goes. Hopefully it will improve your product. If not, then it's better off dying and you concentrating on something healthier, rather than being pissed at google all the time.
But if I were putting together a list of companies I actively dislike, Yelp would be near the top.
#DeleteChrome
destroying jobs and stifling innovation
Would Yelp have been any better if positions had been reversed?
I've posted reviews of restaurants which were 100% honest and quite objective, only to see the review I posted "disappear" a day or two after I posted.
This has happened multiple times, with different restaurants. I asked a restaurant owner about this and he told me it was indeed possible to "make unfavorable reviews disappear". He smiled as he said this, but it didn't keep the place he owned from going out of business about a year later.
For me, Yelp has zero credibility.
I believe it is smarter to simply ask the locals where THEY like to eat, and do this in real life, not on some website.
While Google has done some scuzzy things, Yelp's whole business model is to allow unlimited free unchecked negative reviews, then to charge businesses to take them down. I know who I am rooting for in this battle.
Since they require you to download and install their App on android to actually read any more than the first 3 reviews, I haven't used them. Always use google reviews.
Fuck Yelp.
Many dubious reviews
Allegations of "Payola"
Allegations of business shakedowns
Too many novices rate everything 5 stars, or 1 star
In the grander scheme of things I'm not sure we should take Company B's advice that Company A is wrong and should be penalized, merely because Company B writes op-eds and sweet talks regulators. AKA ~ Regulatory Capture.
Yelp is just out to destroy Google since they are the competition. I'm not defending Google either though.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of extortionists...
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/09/22/0156242/small-restaurant-out-maneuvers-yelp-in-reviews-war
Yelp hires sales people to bully restaurants into paying for advertising and other premium services on its network, threatening to essentially blackball them if they don't comply. It's really abhorrent behaviour. Google may be the big behemoth here, but as far as I know they have never pulled any of this kind of crap. Yelp is like Facebook—the customer is the product. They aren't actually interested in providing accurate, unbiased reviews. They are interested in selling advertising and mining people's data which they can then sell for profit. I liked and used Yelp in its early days, like most of us, but would highly suggest moving away from it now as much possible.
This is like saying a car manufacturers cannot put cup holders in their vehicles because it'll hurt aftermarket manufacturers of cup holders. Google isn't going around sabotaging Yelp's ability to compete. Yelp just want government protection because they can't compete.
It is the most useless site ever. I see is show up in search results all the time. I wish I could just block it. Fuckers like this should be taken out and beat to death with a brick. Fucking worthless piece of shit Jeremy Stoppelman. Piece of shit wants to the gov't to force everyone else to use his shitty product because he thinks he should be rich. Fuck off you worthless piece of garbage.
Well, that's one less couch at google hq with loose change down the crevice.
Maybe they should write a bad review for Google. Fuck you yelp, fuck you and die. You are completely worthless.
Fuck them.
Maybe it's just me?
My wife and I own a restaurant business. I did some analysis on our reviews. We have a total of ~150 reviews. Of those, ~50 are "filtered." Of those filtered reviews, ~85% are four and five stars. If someone creates an account to give is a bad review, that review doesn't get filtered for about a month, if ever. If someone creates an account to give us five stars, it's filtered within a day or two. I have high hopes for tagdat, I hope they significantly cut into yelp's advertising income. Fuck yelp.
Let Google stop crawling Yelp. Yelp will scream while Google sings "Let it be."
Funny how site that are 100 percent dependent on Googles crawling are claiming unfair competition. Google simply need charging these sites a fee to crawl them and list them.
Why haven't I heard of them earlier? (no, the answer is not 'Antarctica'...)
I trust Google's reviews far more than I trust Yelp. In my experience, they tend to be a hell of a lot more accurate too.