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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.
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.
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.
While Yelp complains about Google, Yelp has been conducting a mafia-like protection racket for most of its existence. If a business refuses to pay money to Yelp they suddenly find themselves getting lots of negative reviews.
Fuck Yelp.