This is something important that a lot of people miss when discussing unethical actions by corporations. It would be foolish from the perspective of Yelp or Google to not exploit the massive power differential here, so of course they will. It isn't a matter of morals, morals don't talk. Money does.

Competition, fairness, and freedom are not free, they have to be defended adaptively against stuff like this.

If users would hit yelp.com and searched for a restaurant and somehow google intercepted that then they'd be a parasite. The way I see it it is a symbiotic somewhat relationship, at least in theory. Yelp is a parasite on businesses though, they attempt to extort money and give no value in exchange, often times unsuccessfully. Here's an older anecdote I posted about yelp [0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790918

While there are definitely anecdotes about this kind of behavior, I have yet to see evidence of systemic or corporate-sponsored effort to do this. I believe this is more a question of possibly poorly-incentivized sales people rather than an intentional strategy on behalf of Yelp. I think this is backed up by a number of lawsuits that haven't gone anywhere. I might be mistaken; if there is a source showing this is really systemic, I'd be very interested.

Either way, Google now does many of the same things that Yelp does (reviews, photos, metadata management) - but it doesn't really care about the space, apart from being good enough to beat its competition. While today maybe they're motivated to build better products to compete with Yelp for eyeballs, overtime I think this means the reviews space will stagnate. That's unfortunate.

I think this is the core Google problem: They have so much top-of-funnel traffic that they just have to do things "good enough" to crush entire industries of competition. The bar to be sufficiently better enough than "good enough" to build a meaningful competitor to G in any vertical is so high it stops many potential competitors from even trying. The only companies that manage it are ones that have entirely different & massive profitable business models like Apple.

Everywhere Google is, the sector stagnates: Search! RSS readers (with a bit of a renaissance since Google Reader died). Email. Calendars. News lists. Increasingly, reviews. Fortunately MSFT pushes them in docs and hopefully Apple continues to do so in Maps and browsers.

I'm in no way defending anything google here, I was just stating that Yelp if as bad is not worse than google (as they are more desperate for revenue). And I have no incentive to lie, the anecdote was something that happened to a close friend of mine and know what kind of distress it caused. I have no idea if their corporate strategy is to " extort ", but from noticing other incidents they're not too far off. Their actions like the actions of other big corps are absolutely abusive.

I will have to do some searching to grab a screen cap, but I can tell you that Yelp explicitly advertised a paid "feature" to small businesses like mine to hide competitors from top search results in exchange for a fee. I don't know that empirical proof of systemic abusive behavior and antitrust violations would necessarily be useful here. They are clearly employing tactics that actively damage open competition and informed consumer choice, and even anecdotal evidence of that is justification for regulatory movement to stop it.

Yelp can easily expose businesses to people who are more likely to give bad reviews too.

I mean they collect this data on every profile - some reviewers have a TON of 1 star reviews. Hide the restaurants that pay and increase exposure of those that don’t to these reviewers to get them to give poor ratings.

Obviously there is no way to prove this, but it would be a great way to get people to pay while still maintaining plausible deniability. After all, the one star reviewers still have to go to the establishment and have their bad experience.

Out of principle I trust Google more than Yelp as they're less incentivized to extort small businesses. Also companies that cripple their mobile site (while having a functional desktop site) to force an app download deserve everything bad that happens to them