Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google (opens in new tab)

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance.

That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape.

It is ok to be dominant in a product. You aren't, however, allowed to use the dominance in one product to gain you dominance in other products. Google has dominance in search, but using that to kill off competitors for their lesser-liked products isn't fair.

> They have achieved their dominance because their services are viewed as "best" by the majority of folks out there.

Their search service is viewed as "best" my most, but that doesn't mean their reviews service is. That's what's at issue. Being the best at one thing shouldn't allow you to stifle people that are better at another thing. That is certainly not best for consumers.

If Google were 20% of search traffic, they could do many things because there's no dominance at issue. Since Google is the vast majority of search traffic, they can effectively eliminate most competitors. Starting a reviews site? Your listings will fall below our own regardless of their merit. Starting a videos site, YouTube alternatives will always be shown first even if it's not what the user is looking for.

YouTube should be popular on its own merit, not based on Google using its search dominance to choke competitors. Google's reviews should be popular on their own merit, not based on Google using its search dominance to kill off Yelp.

I do want to clarify that I'm not saying that Google is guilty of doing this, but that when you get to a certain market dominance, you can kill off competitors that are better than you by starving them rather than by being better than them. It's important that third-parties can compete with Google's non-search services without having Google's search service unreasonably favor Google's non-search services.

I find it amusing how their argument is similar to the MS' antitrust argument in 90s.

Microsoft: "An OS should include everything. Third party apps aren't needed. It's only good for consumers."

Google: "A search engine should include everything. Third party websites aren't needed. It's only good for consumers."

> nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome

Unlike iOS you can install different browsers on Android directly from the Play Store. These can actually be different browsers with their own rendering engines not just alternative UIs on top of Chrome. Firefox on Android for example uses the actual Firefox rendering engine, not Chrome.

It's not about whether a monopoly is fair or "unfair", it's about whether it provides power that they can abuse and is thus worse for the public interest.

Google got their monopoly fairly enough, maintain it through a mix of fair and questionable practices, and definitely uses their monopoly now in ways that are anti-competitive.

> Google is doing what is best for it's customers.

But is it? Because right now I basically can't stop using Google services at this point because they pushed out many others from the market. I would however greatly prefer some competition in the field.

Whoah. Hold on. The problem is not with Google offering a Review service for HVAC companies. If the Google reviews are more comprehensive and valuable than Yelp- by all means have them show up in the organic listings- for that matter even use up your own budget to take up the sponsored space. But don't pretend that you've now got a new feature as part of search (taking up the sponsored box as a legal maneuver) that offers a similar service like Yelp and that it is part of your Google Search service. That is PURE EVIL.

> Google is doing what is best for it's customers

except it has been shown that the organic search results rank Yelp listings higher than Google's Local listings thus they are, in fact, displaying worse results at the top. Unless you believe Google's search product sucks I think this proves they aren't doing what's best for customers at all, they are doing what's best for them.

Keep in mind they are trying to develop Google Maps into a social review platform where you can write reviews, order delivery, etc. that seems similar to Yelp. Is it not clear they are using their Search monopoly to get more content on their own, currently worse, local reviews platform to have it become more dominant in the long run?

For me Google is the best search on technical issues and research. When it comes down to touchy political and social issues, Bing and DuckDuckGo beat Google every time. In fact I don't even use Google to look up things I see in the news. It is always skewed. I completely avoid Google News.

> I don't see that Google has an unfair monopoly.

really? isn't the use of their search engine to squelch competition in local reviews support that they are a monopoly?

Looking at what is best for consumers is missing the point. The point is that when companies use leverage in one market to help themselves or hurt competitors unfairly in other markets it stifles competition.

It's hard to be a web browser company when it comes bundled with the OS. Do you really want a world where you choose Apple, Google, or Amazon once for everything everywhere and that is the only choice you get? Or do you want Unix philosophy for businesses and mix and match however you feel?

The problem is that Google does what customers want selectively. For example, I don't think I want my search results to be as dominated by ads as they are today.

Once the competition is beaten, they may change their priorities from giving the customer and the partners what they want, to doing what is best for Google. Compare youtube of five years ago to now. There are many more ads and many more restrictions on how partners can place ads. If youtube had started with those rules and that much advertising I think it would have been less successful.

There is a pattern for all internet companies where they say to users and partners: look how great our platform is. And then when they achieve dominance they change the rules. The best protection is competition.

These anti-trust laws were originally created to whack railroad companies, which had huge capital investments and "natural monopolies".

Google does have some investment in its data centers, but people never make the explicit argument that the $11 billion/year in data centers is what causes them to be a monopoly. They make the much more abstract "market dominance" argument that I don't buy.

The only thing that I'd consider a monopoly in the same spirit would be the ISPs. It's stupid to dig up the streets twice just for "competition", so there's a natural monopoly. And it'd probably cost untold billions to rebuild it.

I like Google too. And I like the search engine returning products if it thinks they are relevant. But the issue behind EU commission was that they found Google purposely lower the ranks of relevant competitor's results nearly off the front page without merit.

The typical argument is that Google can do that because it is their search agent. But they did not express it explicitly in their terms of service.

> "Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time."

Ah the irony. Yelp is the same website that bullied small businesses to pay for positive reviews[1].

[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bus...

> Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time

The same basic thing could be said for most of Yelp's customers. Many would prefer that Yelp not exist or not index them but are forced to buy expensive plans with Yelp to have some measure of control over their public profile. It's basically a modern-day version of the protection rackets employed by organized crime. As much as I think Google has outsized power and does need to be reined in in certain circumstances, I have very little sympathy for Yelp being subjected to the same sort of undesirable influence from a larger, more powerful company that they exert on much smaller companies.

It would help if Yelp allowed new, emerging search engines (potential google competitors) to crawl their site. But their robots.txt only allows Google, Bing and a few others to crawl them (https://yelp.com/robots.txt)

allow all crawlers and I would have at least a little sympathy for Yelp.

I agree. As a web publisher who depends on advertising for revenue and Google for traffic, things are getting more and more difficult. Google providing answers in the search box robs legitimate publishers of traffic. But the industry is so fragmented that a concerted legal action against Google is not possible.

Since this is HN, I expect people are going to start chanting "Die you ad supported publishers or find a new business model. We love Google because it's great for the users to read the answer on Google and not have to visit your ad laden site". I understand this sentiment but don't agree with it. Users love anything that's free. That does not mean Google can steal it and give it to them.

The implicit contract between publishers and Google is that publishers let Google crawl and index their content. In return, Google includes the publisher in their search results so users can find the information they are looking for and publishers get traffic. Outright copying of this information is stealing because it robs publishers of their revenue stream.

> Mr. Stoppelman feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small internet companies, Yelp lives in a world where one company, Google, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time.

The same could be said of Yelp:

"Mr. Restaurant Owner feels he has no choice. Like a lot of small restaurants, he lives in a world where one company, Yelp, accounts for an outsize share of its business, and could destroy it at any time."

Google's power in the consumer market is merely commensurate to the market value they create, just like Yelp.

Just like it was impossible to start a car company after say 1920 due to the established players, it has become impossible to start and run a large consumer internet company where the primary function is information retrieval/search like in Yelp. If Google maps did not exist (with "Local Guides" now), Yelp's market cap could have been 5x of what it is. They were lucky that they started in 2004 when Google bombing was still possible: had they started more recently, they would not have gotten even the market cap they have now: high barrier to entry, no cheap distribution channels.

I worked there as a software engineer for six years, first in SF, then remotely in Oregon. I loved it. The people are brilliant and friendly, the codebase and tooling are top-notch. If you're a programmer, it's a great place to work.

Isn't Yelp the company that hosts reviews of local businesses while at the same time getting paid for advertising by those businesses?

As an engineer, it's actually a pretty great employer. I enjoy working there and there's lots of folks who've been there for many years.

That was only in reference to their lobbying "office" in washington DC (no formal office, just a seat in a coworking place).

They lowball you (or rather, their stock performance is garbage and they won't adjust RSUs to account for that).

Their SF headquarters is a standard silicon valley playground. I'm not sure why the author tried to differentiate Yelp from regular SF/Silicon Valley companies by only mentioning its drab satellite office

Not good. The codebase is a terrible monolith using frameworks long-dead everywhere else, there's poor coordination.

It depends on position. They treat CSRs like absolute shit -- see Talia Jane. Given a choice, I'd prefer not to work for companies that treat any employee like that.

There's a bar nearby that has a "People Hate Us On Yelp!" sticker. I ran into the owner there one day and I asked him about it and he claimed that he immediately got it after the third or fourth call from the Yelp sales reps about cleaning up their reviews.

From then on, he started telling people to give bad reviews of the bar. It's not like it matters, it's a very popular bar.

> I found that Yelp's reviews very unreliable.

followed by hearsay about your friends who told you about what a Yelp sales rep said.

How is this an argument for Google's business practices?

Cleaning up reviews is actually not a Yelp feature. Paid or unpaid.

If these businesses are "constantly harassed" why has there never been published a recording of these harassing calls? There are 38 states in which either party can record a call without the consent of the other party.

Their complaint is still just.

You've behaved so atrociously in this thread—with personal attacks, rants, and other violations of HN's guidelines—that you managed to sacrifice whatever high ground you began from and end up well in the hole. It's dismaying to see how much damage a single commenter on tilt can do.

We ban people for this kind of thing, so please don't do it again. Civil and substantive comments only (or no comments) from now on, please.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697996 and marked it off-topic.

You're absolutely right. Yelp adds no value the dozens of other review apps don't, they simply succed because they extort and blackmail small businesses. I refuse to install their app and the quicker they die the better.

> However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service.

...and that you have reason to dislike Yelp or even think they are hypocritical does not counteract the problem with Google, which is the topic at hand, making your comment seem like nothing more than a defense of vigilanteism :/.

> have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies

do you have any evidence of this?

It seems political. The EU is taking on a lot of US companies with antitrust complaints but few EU companies.

Which is a shame. I doubt any real antitrust cases will be brought here in the US for the next 4 years.

Apparently only if you buy an elephant for one of their regulators.

It's always worth noting that today's underdog could be tomorrow's monopolist. When any of these companies get on top, they'll do anything to stay that way.

So like, today I would consider Microsoft an ally against the current monopoly party, but I have no doubt that Microsoft would return to their old ways if they were on top again.

Sure, but a despicable company may still have legitimate complaints about other companies.