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.

Comments

What is evil is Google doing against Yelp?

[Nutria]

I see Yelp quite often in Google search results.

Say it!

[aglider]

We want to be bought by Google.
That's it.

Yelp is corrupt. I speak from experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.