They did. It worked great and was awesome. One day, a large company changed it's rules removing most of the traffic pointed to it. It had to make changes. One attempt to survive was to move traffic to the app. I don't understand why trying to survive as a business is bad. Maybe people didn't want to click the close button on the app link -- I don't see how this should end Yelp and let google have more unchecked power to the small business reviews.
People would seek out Yelp directly. But even the search term "Yelp" itself it down roughly 50% since 2014, suggesting that less and less people would actively and directly seek out that page.
When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user.
Right. Like Amazon not needing roads. Or Walgreens needing a working Pharmacological system.
"When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user."
Ugh. Yes. That is called a monopoly.
So this is the behavior as GOOGLE:
1) Remove all traffic to site
2) Re-create same site on Google
3) Point all traffic that was in 1) to google.
4) The site will try to move traffic to mobile -- but users will just get upset at the site. Because the interstitial is hard to tap on.
Is this really all they need todo to capture users? Sad.
The sentence you replied to wasn't even tangentially related to the definition of a monopoly. It is something every search engine should do whether they have a monopoly or not, which is ranking things highly that are most useful to me. Sites hiding stuff behind interstitials just aren't.
Now Google sure aren't angels, but the "penalizing interstitials" part hardly is the evil part.
It might've been the creation of a competing product with a decent user experience that was evil. But then yelp was hardly sitting on a secret sauce. A 10 year old with 1 year of programming experience can build a review portal, and it'll likely be more pleasant to use than one that is intentionally crippled by it's owners.
Create a service people will actually want to use?
They got a penalty for creating a frustrating experience, so they replaced it with another kind of frustrating experience?