The exact same thing happened to the company I worked for, which was active in the online local business market (i.e. putting small and medium businessed up on the map, with descriptions, ratings and everything). I was in charge of Information Retrieval, as in half of the data was collected by my colleagues physically going from door to door and collecting info, and the other half was inserted by me in the DB from a set of diverse publicly available data (mostly some Excel files collected from the ministries' websites and formatted by me for SQL INSERTs). Not a year passes and Google Places is launched, and another couple of months later almost all of our businesses are in there, with errors and all. At least they didn't take us out of their SERPS, they figured we were too small for them to really matter (Eastern-European country). At least I'm happy I'm not paranoid, I had thought about this ever since my company was forced to exit that business space.
The same thing happened to Yelp [1]. I'm sure the EU and FTC would like to hear your startup's case.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8354655/Google-is...
Two days later my site disappeared from Google SERPs with no ostensible reason. I later found out there were Googlers in the audience for my talk.
Correlation is not causation, so no proof, just suspicion.
Google: Billions of dollars to piss away on stupid ideas.
Yeah... he's not going to win.
See Microsoft versus the poor sap who trademarked "Internet Explorer". He had a black and white ownership of the trademark. He sued MS, and we all know what the result was: they're still using the name "Internet Explorer"
Why? They buried him with lawyers. Then, offered to pay his legal expenses if he stopped the lawsuit, and turned over the trademark to them.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/02/business/microsoft-settles...
If anyone thinks the justice system is about justice, you're deluded.
Us: Gullible
Edit: Downvotes please explain why I should believe everything I read on the internet.
What it boils down to is that when an attorney sends an accusation to your legal team, your legal team has to respond. The bigger the company, the more nonsense requests they can afford to send to your team which drives up your legal expenses in terms of billable hours. They can't not-respond.
The old "get 50 boxes of files" when requesting an single paper trope is a thing that actually does happen.
The bigger the opposition, the more of those requests will come across and the more things your team will have to respond to. If you had a $2000 dispute with a huge company, if they wanted to they could ensure that your legal bill was hundreds of thousands of dollars, which increases your personal level of risk if you lose the case. If you lose, you're bankrupt.
The only way you can afford to get in a court battle like that is if you have that type of money to risk.
Source: Friends with a lot of lawyers for some reason
I don't dispute that. I think it's common knowledge, particularly among techies who are all too familiar with patent trolls.
Lawsuits aren't the only option. He could also go to the press. Unless this guy settled a suit, he's not legally bound to be vague. As it is, it's another unverifiable claim on the internet from an anonymous source. Too many to count.
Angry pitch fork Internet mobs don't like skeptics. They probably would have been superstitiously burning witches 1000 years ago but now there's a different work of Satan to get all frothed up about. It's ridiculous. Google has done an immeasurable amount of good in the world by bringing knowledge to millions of people. By helping cross cultural barriers and disseminate ways of thinking. Unlike most "startups" Google really has changed the world. But hey, a professor got fired and some opportunistic journalist is making un-evidenced spin, so fire the torches up. If you don't get with the mob you are obviously a witch as well.
As for Google Places results being listed higher, if they were search results being artificially boosted, that's one thing; however, showing callouts that provide the information immediately is pretty clearly better from a user perspective, which makes it hard to show harm to the users.
Of course, you can sue over anything, but whether it makes sense to win is another question.
But this is categorically bad behaviour.
Websites like yours clog up search results with useless garbage. Millions of auto-generated pages from official listings that pretend to have reviews and such but never actually do. I am happy Google moved it down the result list.
if you didn't get a second opinion, you should have found a new lawyer
We actually had quite a nice thing going, and were indexed well in Google and other search engines. The community was growing and becoming vibrant.
Then, Google Places came out. Not only did they put their places listings at the top of all organic search results, they removed all traces of our site from their index. We couldn't even find our homepage by searching for it! Not even our company name --- it would literally come up no results, even news articles and content not hosted on our site was removed from the index if it had our name in it.
What really put salt in the wound, though, was the fact that it appeared Google had stolen our user data for their own places product. That's right, they actually took our information that we had painstakingly collected, cleaned, and verified (we had our own call center and would take updates from customers) and passed it off as their own.
How did I know this? Well, I had a few test accounts that were of completely fake businesses that accidentally made it to prod. They had funny names that would be impossible to exist in the real world. These businesses showed up in Google Places. I checked a few other listings that I knew had been updated by customers, one with a typo, and sure enough they were in places too.
Before this we had a good relationship with our Google rep because we used adwords on our site, and Google Analytics. Literally, over night they just stopped responding to us by e-mail and phone. We were cut off, and e-mails and requests to the company went to some robot customer service queue and were closed without being able to speak to anyone.
Our search referrer traffic was reduced to almost nothing, our Adsense account was closed, and the business eventually had to close. We considered trying to fight it legally, but after meeting with a lawyer and realizing the reality of the situation I left feeling completely defeated and jaded.
How many of these stories are out there? How many people have been silenced by Google, and won't or don't talk about it? You only hear about big time scandals in the news, but I can guarantee there's a huge long tail of destruction in their monopolistic wake.
The sad part is I'm forced to use Google products because they are just so big there aren't good alternatives. They are so far ahead. But whenever I do see some Google ad, or post by Larry or Eric about how they are doing god's work over there, curing cancer, working on self driving cars, guarding the world's information or resisting authoritarian, communist governments, I ask myself: are they really that different? Who are they kidding? Maybe they are just so out of touch with the realities of what really made their company successful they can afford to live in such a fantasy land...
Is Google evil? Yes, indeed.