You might be right, but a company’s abuse of dominant position isn’t defined by the quality of their competitor’s offer.

You are right, at least in the traditional anti-trust-ish legal sense as I understand it.

In a wider more pedestrian sense, there is a some kettle-pot-black involved here, at least in my opinion.

Yelp's a little monopolistic middle man. Everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp because everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp. Market dominance today is the main ingredient for dominance tomorrow. Everyone uses Google search, maps, phones etc. Google gets all the data & ad revenue. They use this to maintain their dominance.

Pick your euphemism for this position: momentum, network effects, buffet's moat, thiel's-monopoly, dominance, viral feedback loops.... Whatever you call it, a restaurant can't opt out of yelp, just like a website can't opt out of google. Their rules are the rules. There is no option B.

A downstream company can be harmed when Google competes direct (AKA the terror of 2006), when they redirect traffic to alternative web pages or disrupts market dominance downstream, intentionally or otherwise.

This is like Yelp's relationship with restaurants. Yelp can stop sending a restaurant customers. Google can stop sending Yelp users. There are no "market dynamics," no "invisible hands," price signals or whatnot. There is no "market" to impose discipline in the way the laissez-faire idealization does on paper.

So... I'm kind of torn. I want to see far more complaints, cases & legislation targeting market dominance, size and monopoly. On the other hand, the hypocrisy...

You're right. This is a kettle-pot issue. So how come so many arguments here get reduced to "I side with kettle!"

Yelp is bad. Google is bad. Or more precisely, both are amoral, and responding rationally to the incentives of the internet. The traditional anti-trust sense you mention doesn't take network effects into account. If you ask me, network effects cause the landscape of the internet to inevitably trend towards oligopoly.

This explains why the strategy of most startups amounts to "Growth at all costs, until you're the only game in town" (The model of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and every wannabe unicorn running at a huge loss to investors)

How is Google amoral?

I agree that the matter is multi-faceted, of course. I just wanted to point out that we can't use a competing service's quality to assess whether market dominance was exerted or not. Neither I think it can be an extenuating factor. One isn't any less a murderer if they kill another murderer.

Should a different case (maybe a class action) be brought against Yelp for abusing its position and momentum to force restaurants into joining the platform? Probably yes, but it would be a different case which, albeit rightful, has nothing to do with the Yelp-Google case.

I suppose, I just don't understand where that line of thinking heads, in terms of an even theoretical resolution.

Yelp sues google for monopolistic practice. Restaurant federations sue yelp. We sue fb for giving us the willies. The lawyers do very well and there's a legal bubble. Peter Thiel automates lawyers, funded by google who by 2026 are sitting on the largest horde of cash ever stashed but technically bankrupt, pending legal appeals and fully tallied lawyer bills. Legal event horizon in 3.. 2.. shoes.

I don't think I speaking besides the issue (apart from the obvious bits). Are either of these companies accused of anything, formally? Murder may be a bit strong.

For what's worth, I never used Yelp in my life. I seem to only remember using Tripadvisor.

Yelp has been horrible since day one. If google has or has not abused its position Yelp is not the standard we would use to determine that.

This makes no sense. Yelp could be the worst company ever created, but if they had market share and Google worked to seize that market with unfair practices, that counts as abuse of dominant position. There is a dangerous conflation of two very distinct categories in your line of thought.

If think the point being made is Amazon didn't suffer the same fate as Yelp wrt to book reviews because Amazon had a better product than whatever Google produced.

You mean Amazon actually has a product. Until yelp started doing deliveries, order now and cashback its product was a content farm.

I know a few people in the restaurant industry (owners/managers). They all say the same thing: at best engaging yelp ( and advertising on yelp ) is a non-negative. It does not bring enough new customers to justify its expense.

The best yelp engagement I saw worked with customers directly: a property manager ran a raffle for half off a months rent. To enter, you just had to leave a review on yelp. They didn’t explicitly ask for good reviews, but the majority were pretty positive.

For about the same amount that yelp wanted for sponsorship, they got over 30 real, quality reviews that complimented the recent improvements that had been made.

Exactly. Do a product search and Amazon one of the top links even though Amazon banned any company on their market place from being allowed to sell several Google products and even hijacked people looking.

Yelp sucks so not a top link. Seems to be working in a fair manner.

The problem comes with the fact that it's possible to game algorithms. We have examples where a poor service or website becomes (remains) popular, because they're good at gaming the system. Eg Pinterest.

Or in the case of the example they brought up in the video, where they counted the number of reviews you could game that system by just creating fake reviews or trying to just get more of them through non-organic ways.

'Eg Pinterest'

A classic example of a business that Google should be using their dominance against, but aren't.

In a roundabout way Google are more like Pinterest than you think. Both utilising other people’s content.

All just glorified databases with different UI really. Yelp kind of has original content in people’s opinion of db entries.

YouTube however is slightly different since people post short and long form video on which is mostly original.

Interesting.

'In a roundabout way Google are more like Pinterest than you think. Both utilising other people’s content.'

True, which makes me wonder why Google don't just add a bit of Pinterest-style functionality and then start applying search quality guidelines against Pinterest?

I know there are copyright issues but I expect Google would do a better job of linking to the original source - something Pinterest seem unable to do at all?

Google spent billions to develop the huge data processing systems and algorithms to eventually leave Yelp behind, like a freight train leaves a horse behind.

Yelp missed the industrialization of their industry by machine.

Knowing what you're doing isn't monopolistic.

> seize that market with unfair practices

Please describe what you consider a fair practice to seize a market in general terms.

The enemy of my enemy is... still horrible.

But, maybe, abusing a dominant position is a lot easier when the competitor's offer is so poor?

For a lot of popular queries the results are dominated by paid directories, aggregators and such that offer no great value to consumers.

Google's listings tend to be more accurate in terms of location and the reviews more reliable.

> You might be right, but a company’s abuse of dominant position isn’t defined by the quality of their competitor’s offer.

And the assumption that Yelp's offer is of poorer quality is debatable. Google's own algorithm apparently often ranks its content lower than its competitors in organic search results.

The second video shows this: they created proof-of-concept plugin that uses Google's own organic search results to power a clone of Google+ local: https://youtu.be/k9UqqmIJW4g

Craigslist is terrible but people still use it. If Google entered that market and showed their own classified ads as search results above Craigslist's, would you say that "Craigslist couldn't see their audience was going to dry up"?

At what point is it too much? Google wants to classify all the world's information—doesn't seem like there are many markets it wouldn't enter. Is every business just living on borrowed time because the Eye of Google hasn't swung toward them yet?

Craigslist is actually pretty good for some users. It works on a computer that is over 10 years old, it has minimum levels of moderation, and does a really good job of letting people interact/trade in their local areas.

The quality of the site is not the point. The point is whether or not Google abuses their market position. Whether Nixon bugging the Democratic office at The Watergate is a crime or not doesn't hinge on whether McGovern is a good candidate.

This was a big scare 10-12 years ago.

Google will eat the world. Whether you were selling an RSS client or giving away a social network, the fear was that Google could take your whole market sector.

How? Google search is the way customers find you, initially and every time they want to log in. If they want to compet, all the customers already have google accounts and they're already logged in. Google has useful customer data: "you are in a restaurant now and often visit yelp, do you want to write a review?"

Lean on 2 or 3 of these advantages, and Google can have a yelp-killer sketched out in an afternoon and built in a quarter.

In reality, Google didn't really eat everything. The web was just too big. They also sucked at some stuff like new communication or social network paradigms (wave, plus hangouts). But, Google's bigger now. Theyve eaten most of the big dishes. Yelp might still be too small a snack, but... the point about dominance is true. Google have a lot of power. If they want into some web sector, they can just power through the marketing & chicken-egg problems that kill 92.6% of the competition.

Yelp’s mobile website is also intentionally limited to force you to download the app (so they can mine your personal info). It’s infuriating. Not to mention the desktop website hasn’t changed meaningfully in years. Yelp is one of the least innovative companies and they manage to remain fairly dominant in their category. I really wish they had been replaced already.

Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.

This is completely Anecdotal, but, as a foodie, I find the Google reviews have a higher aggregate "crowd wisdom" than Yelp. I am constantly shocked by the lack of correlation between rating and quality in the restaurants I look up on yelp.

Before it died, UrbanSpoon was better than Yelp too.

TripAdvisor is the worst because it's 99% tourists, so you never get a local's opinion of what's good in their area.

Just my 2 cents.

Google reviews have orders of magnitute higher counts compared to yelp throughout Europe and likely elsewhere outside the US.

I don't know if any of this is carryover from Zagat but I tend to agree. Zagat was quirky in its own way with the brief summations of crowdsourced (before that was a term) comments on restaurants--but, because it was definitely oriented toward foodies, I found it very reliable.

I do find Yelp better than throwing darts at a dartboard. But especially if reviews are thin or the restaurant caters to the sports bar crowd or whatever, it's not much better.

I honestly don't think any of the crowdsourced sites are great. But it's hard to get much from other sources outside of some major cities, especially if you're just looking for something simple.

Zagat had enormous grade inflation. There were even studies done on it - unfortunately the name of the paper currently escapes me and googling only provides explanation of why it is happening rather than the data source.

Yelp's biggest issue is Yelp Elite crowd. It wields sufficient power in local markets that people want to belong to it and in order to belong one does not just need to review lots of places, one needs to review them quite well i.e. lots of positive spin ( look at distribution of 4-5 stars vs. 1-2 stars in ratings given to restaurants by Yelp Elite ). So either all the places are amazing or as the group Elites have a collective hive mind.

>Zagat had enormous grade inflation.

Yes, but so does pretty much every rating system of this type. Most 3-star items on Amazon aren't very good. [1]

Back when they used a 30 point system, I found that anything above 21 or so on Zagat was almost always pretty decent. Yelp seems to be around 4-star+ with less consistency.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1098/

> Google reviews are also pretty horrific as well. Completely untamed and unprofessional, by people that don't know anything about the subject.

I'm not sure what the problem is, in both cases reviews are crowd-sourced. So what level of professionalism are you expecting from websites where anybody can leave a review?

Are these journal peer-reviews that I've missed? I don't know of any certificate courses that allows one to comment on the ambiance of a restaurant.

I wouldn't say Google reviews are ideal but I've found them to be a lot more reliable than the alternative.

For example, Booking.com, etc.

Completely the opposite for me.

At least booking.com allows reviews only when you booked. And when I read the comments most point out real problems or benefits of the different housings.

AirBNB reviews on the other hand are painfully useless.

And Google is the worst, with a shitload of review from people that look like that probably didn't even went to the place, or just disliked being denied on a discount of something, so you jget useless 5 stars review that say "best food ever" and 1 star reviews for "super rude server, worst restaurant ever" for the same average restaurant, and nothing in between to tell you what the place actually feels like or what food is good/bad there.

My experience is mainly limited to Hotels though and I've found 1 star reviews on Google tend to match my actual experience with bad hotels very closely.

I am based in Europe though so maybe this isn't a universal experience?

Watched the segment and completely agree. I was shocked this segment even made it on 60 minutes.

It was just Yelp sour grapes and curious how it even made it on 60 minutes?

Yelp never made sense. It's surprising that it got so big. It's obvious that Google maps was going to offer the same service as them and that Yelp would not stand a chance.

Going to have to agree with some caveats. Google's review system is pretty superb. But that doesn't mean they don't dominate this area. However, I feel like this is a space that could still use some innovation. I use Waze for navigation but for informational purposes I still use Maps.

I would be, dare I say it, willing to subscribe to a cheap platform that would do both better.

They could also launch worldwide.

So one monopoly has been replaced by another. Bizarre to conclude from this that "the system works".

I’m bullish on yelp still, they have the highest quality community sourced reviews, a forward thinking engineering team, and energetic management. I think they will pull through and continue to be competitive with Google, but they need better marketing!

Is there two Yelps?