[redm]

"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."

That sums it up for Yelp and many others, myself included. Combine that reality with the black box that Google is, in many ways, and you have an inaccessible behemoth who's decisions decide the fate of many.

Googles combination of Search, Browser, and Advertising dominance gives it a unique position of power. Then there are secondary markets like Android that just buttress their position.

I see the fight raging about net neutrality and keep thinking that Google neutrality is just as important. It affects people in even more meaningful ways, determining where they go and what they see on the Internet.

[parthdesai]

> "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...

[timr]

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

No, Yelp is accused of this. Nobody has ever shown it to be true.

(I can also tell you, as someone who worked there, that it definitely is not true, but you don't have to take my word for it. You just have to not confuse accusations with facts.)

[tyingq]

I can see both being true. Assuming the sales staff are on commission, there's a strong possibility some asshattery happened.

Perhaps you didn't run into any unethical sales staff.

[timr]

I ran into plenty of idiots in sales. I don't assume anything about what salespeople say...but I know for a fact that salespeople at Yelp have no ability to affect reviews.

[tyingq]

Anyone has the ability to affect reviews to some degree. And anyone can imply they have more control.

[timr]

"Anyone has the ability to affect reviews to some degree."

No, they don't. Except in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.

[JCzynski]

As someone who also worked there, the official company line internally is a suspiciously specific denial that does not actually deny the main accusations I had heard previously. I consider it just as plausible that Yelp squelches negative reviews when paid as I did before.

[criddell]

I came here looking for claims like these. It always has baffled me the number of first hand accounts of Yelp salesperson shenanigans with no documented examples.

What do you think is the root of the accusations? Do yelp salespeople promise things they can't deliver?

[anindha]

I know of one cafe owner that had legitimate 5 star reviews removed. They were returned after the bad press.

[keymone]

there are a lot of businesses on yelp. some of them are bound to suck. blaming somebody else is the easiest option and yelp is the easiest target.

[criddell]

I was thinking more about the reports that Yelp salespeople suggest that they can clean up bad reviews.

[programmernews3]

Trustpilot is the new kid on the block for the review shakedown, blackmail as a service provider

[curun1r]

> 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.

[annexrichmond]

> but are forced to buy expensive plans with Yelp to have some measure of control over their public profile

what evidence do you have to suggest that (a) business owners are forced to buy plans from Yelp (b) there's a strong correlation between business owners who don't pay Yelp and are not successful? I'm pretty sure these have been debunked[1] but if you have data I'd like to see it.

in spite of this, even if you personally believe Yelp has sketchy business practices, is unethical, etc. it does not follow that what Google is doing is OK. There are actually laws that attempt to stop what Google is doing but as far as I know, Yelp's not breaking any laws.

[1] http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoum...

[curun1r]

Data, no. But I worked at a company that built a product for small business marketing/reputation. So I and my colleagues there spoke to hundreds of different small businesses and it was a recurring theme. My team actually worked on an integration with Yelp, so we had discussions with customers specifically on that topic. At one point, we asked our success team (a team that called customers once per month to proactively help with issues they might be having) to look for customers who were also happy Yelp customers as potential beta testers of our integration. In their first two weeks of calls, they didn't find any happy Yelp customers among the ~18,000 of our customers they called. They eventually found two among the other half of our customer base, but seeing that it was literally 2 out of thousands led me to my point of view.

Of course, it doesn't absolve Google of their tactics. I only mentioned it because it seems like a pot-kettle situation to me. My company actually had its own problems with Google. At one point, Google switched from displaying reviews that we collected and syndicated to them on search results to hiding them behind a "X more reviews on ..." link. I believe it was when Google started collecting their own reviews, but it was before my time there. It almost killed the company and made our offering significantly less valuable.

[AznHisoka]

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.

[bdcravens]

Presumably they want a legal defense against scrapers.

[anindha]

There are probably food delivery and restaurant reservation startups complaining that Yelp has a monopoly position on restaurant search.

[putlake]

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.

[AznHisoka]

OK, so now that implicit contract changed and says Google can show that information above the organic search results. Given this, publishers do have a choice of blocking Google in their robots.txt.

this is an implicit agreement (not explicit). the agreement changed. publishers still have a chance to respond... dont like it? block google! (its just 1 line in robots.txt) go rely on word of mouth, bing, ads and emailing to get traffic!

dont want to do that? oh i see... well that means you voluntarily agree to the agreement and have no right to complain.

[falsedan]

> you voluntarily agree to the agreement and have no right to complain

See, that sounds exactly like the kind of thing a standover merchant would say: feel free not to pay the protection fees, sure would be a shame if something would happen to your organic search traffic…

[putlake]

Blocking Google via robots.txt isn't an option because Google has a monopoly. You're amputating the whole leg because of an infected toe. Instead of free samples at Costco you're giving away entire boxes and users love you for it because it's free. It's the producer who loses the revenue.

At what point do you draw the line? Is it OK if Google steals 1 line? How about a whole list of steps for how to do something? How about when Google takes an image from your page and puts it in its hero search result "answer box" but with a link to another site?

As a publisher, I feel the right solution is that the publisher decides the title and meta description -- which are the 2 things Google needs to show in their SERPs. If my title and description snippet are clickbaity or not good enough, other publishers can win. That's fine because publishers are competing on a level playing field.

[concede_pluto]

> it's great for the users to read the answer on Google

Do you disagree with that part? If a user reads a couple of sentences and decides they won't gain anything more by reading your page, are they wrong?

[nradov]

Web publishers have gotten lazy. Instead of becoming more dependant on Google and then complaining about being marginalized they should put more effort into marketing directly to their target audience and finding non-advertising revenue models.

[putlake]

Even when publishers have a good brand, it doesn't change user behavior. How often do users directly go to Wikipedia to look something up? Google search is integrated into Chrome, Android, Google Home. Google is a monopoly.

Yes, publishers should find non-advertising revenue models. Yes, they should find non-Google sources of traffic. But that's blaming the victim. The fact is that Google has started stealing more and more content from large and small publishers in order to keep the user from leaving Google. And it's not OK for a monopoly to do that.

[nradov]

Content isn't stolen when it's given voluntarily. Websites can block the Google crawler, or remove their pages from the search index.

[ViViDboarder]

As has been pointed out, so many users have gotten in the habit of using an omni-box to go to all URLs via a search. Staying its a choice to block Google is a false choice as that would mean death. The analogies are spot on. Google is in a position of power due to search dominance and content creators have very little unless every content creator decided to all drop off together. This is unlikely.

[themacguffinman]

> 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.

[cft]

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.

[nradov]

I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic? Several car companies operating today were founded after 1920.

[erk__]

You are right it would be more precise to say after 1948. There is only one company in the 10 biggest companies that got founded after 48.

[falsedan]

Who owns them now?