Forbes.com just wrote a pretty scathing article on Google based off the Senate antitrust hearing on Thursday saying “Google has perpetrated what maybe the largest bait and switch scheme ever.”
“Simply, Google has baited over a billion users to implicitly trust Google Search by continuously promising that its search engine is unbiased and “always does what is best for the user.”
“However, as Google’s market power has grown over time, the evidence shows Google has increasingly switched its MO to biasing Google Search rankings by putting Google’s interests over users’ best interests by ranking Google-owned properties over competitors’ properties — without fairly representing this major business model shift and new clear financial conflict of interest to those affected. ”
“This core deceptive ‘bait and switch’ business practice of Google’s was effectively the overarching and recurring theme of the Senate Judiciary antitrust hearing on Google’s monopoly power.”
“The artcile cited testimony of the Jeremy Stoppelman the CEO of Yelp, who testified that Google offered to work closely with Yelp as a partner (the bait), but then learned Google was really interested in learning the intricacies of Yelp’s business so that it could compete with Yelp’s business (the switch).”
“Yelp’s CEO concisely described the switch in Google’s business model: “Google is no longer in the business of sending people to the best sources of information on the Web,” “It now hopes to be a destination market itself”
“The hearing will be remembered as a turning point in the Google antitrust story. Everyone naturally knows that saying one thing and doing another, like Google is doing repeatedly to users and content suppliers, the classic bait and switch con, is deceptive and wrong. A bipartisan panel of U.S. Senators knows it and the media who reported on the hearing increasingly “get it.”
You can listen to the hearing and the testimony here
The testimony was damning to Google and it will be interesting to see how Congress reacts.
Perhaps Google should increase the weighting of exact match domains to show clarity in results. It would also knock out the heavy weights like yelp, amazon, etc
I would agree an exact match domain should not guarantee that a minisite makes it to page one of Google. But I have seen countless examples of high PR sites like Wiki which are not the best content result for that particular search query showing up on page one of Google when better content sites get pushed to some obscure page. Another annoyance is that Google now allows 2-3 paid search results above organic search results. So even a top five result gets pushed far down the first page. Who wins? Who loses? And then who gains when Youtube videos show up in the top half of page one of a search query? Remember those ads streaming at the bottom of Youtube videos?
What’s the problem here? It’s their search engine…they can direct traffic to anywhere they want. If you don’t like it, don’t use their search engine. They dominate because they are the best. There will be viable alternatives when they are no longer performing their searches to enough people’s satisfaction.
Would you rather have the government do the search for you??? Now, there is a thought. haha
If I am Amazon..yelp or whatever…I would shut out search engines from all my content…and make consumers go to my website to do their search. Do they have the ball to do that? I think not.
@BS
and how would you just “make consumers go to my website”
Restaurant.com has posters at Chicago Midway.
As a domain developer I will watch this with interest. But as a capitalist I do not understand why Google should have to do anything. They are right, nobody has to go their site. One can go to Amazon or Yelp or any site they want. Honestly, these sites are more of a threat than the search engines to geo or product developers. At least I can run PPC on Google above their own restaurant results. Criticizing PPC is ridiculous. This is Google’s revenue stream, of course they will put paid results above “natural.” What are they a government service? It is like criticizing a retailer for putting high margin items on the end of the isle or a magazine for not putting the main story on the inside page of the cover.
It is also why I have never spent 2 cents on SEO. If you cannot compete with Yelp, Amazon, etc on SEO, PPC must be part of a model which delivers a profit. Traffic acquisition is part of any business. Whether it is foot traffic for a car lot or traffic to a site web. ( that’s all the French I know)
This monopoly is similar to the NFL.
I meant at Poor Uncle, sorry.
google has been a helluva lot better at handling their dominant status than ibm, microsoft, or (soon to be) apple ever were.
guess who’s making them play unfair? microsoft, facebook and apple. they’ve been suckered into playing childish games with these pathetically marketing-dependent companies.
do you really think two engineering students like larry and sergei were gung-ho about marketing? as a surrogate for quality? they were young. they’ve been tainted by their competitors’ lame, child-like tactics.
this is yellow pages 2.0
1.0: money gets you a large ad at the otherwise beginning of the alphabetical listings.
nothing has changed there.
2.0: it’s not alphabetical anymore. there’s not division between white pages, blue pages or yellow pages. the line between non-commercial and commercial is blurring. listing order with google is all about speculation as to “relevance” (based on speculation as to popularity). speculation because it relies on factors that can be manipulated. enter seo.
in neither case, 1.0 or 2.0, is competition barred from entering the field. isn’t that the issue here?
no one is blocking the bing bot.
no one is stopping facebook’s employees from snooping on the world’s private converations, and selling that right to “customers” for a fee.
facebook (microsoft) and apple are desperately trying to create the proverbial “walled gardens”. that could be the beginning of the end of the “free internet”.
microsoft/facebook and apple are just pure evil. they can only make things worse, not better.
microsoft is the one behind the antitrust action against google.
like with ibm and ms, it will eventually be dropped.
more competition in the field would be better for domainers and consumers. but the result of going after google in this way is not aimed at that. it’s aimed at keeping ms/fb and apple from being overtaken by google.
yes, we need more competition. but these claims against google are insultingly stupid. it’s obvious who is behind it and what their motivations are.
BF, well you can’t make the customer do anything. You need to provide a product or service better than your competitors and hopefully the customers will find you. If you have the best and they still don’t come then obviously you are not doing it right.
I prefer government to be in charge of search.
blekko, a legitimate google competitor, is not whining about google
blekko +1
search may get worse, not better, if these anti-google complainers have their way.
want to be more visible?
share 100% of your content.
let anyone index it.
in fact, just give them a data dump. save bandwidth.
if you want to be found, then open up.
your data should be cached everywhere possible.
but if you ask yelp for an index of their content what do you think they would say?
they would get very defensive.
greedy little pinheads.
this is the yellow pages. public information, remember? or, even worse, public-info sprinkled with user-generated content, which these companies do not own but would not hesistate to charge for access to, if they could get away with it.
Do no evil.
We may pretend were basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise. that is for you” Google remember money corrupts all who touch it
Hi,
Have not seen or heard this classic Google “philosophical line of BS” in quite a few years now.
“Do No Evil”
That is because it went out the door….about 3 minutes after they came up with it.
Peace!
‘D’
@Uzoma…..good one.
That is damn scary!
@ MHB, Nice find!
Stats seem skewed on the GAKT, which make me scratch my head, but realize the marketing department has an agenda there. Some phrases are missing.
Nextel is venting its frustration because it doesn’t want to supply text. Its homepage had no text. One product page had two lines of description. That’s not enough. Candy.com is #1 because it gives Google what it wants, even if it appears 3/4 down the source code – what the crawler sees – original text.
Yelp, on the other hand, has a valid point. Google at first licensed Yelp’s content, then in 2010 simply incorporated its content into Google Local, except Yelp’s ads, so that Google benefitted from Yelp content.
Funny Google has the same conundrum of companies it demotes: lack of original content!
There is a blurb about my opinion, Feed the Google Monster, on a sticky post on EmergingDomnains.
Government is in charge of Licensed Contractors, and Licensed Medical doctors, nurses, barbers, dentists, congresspeople, and so many others, why can’t it handle stupid search results? At least it’ll be fair, good or bad, to all. I hate some company telling me what’s relevant in a search.
For example, imagine I am a website professor at MIT, and I’m searching for a ‘terrible’ website to show my students how not to develop a website; thanks to Google, I could never find a horrible website because they refused to index’em. So, I’m stuck with ‘good” websites only. Mission unaccomplished!
This is crazy world. Jeremy Stoppleman is an immoral thief who exploits small business people in order to get rich. Congress should be investigating Yelp not Google. Google did exactly what we want them to do. They excercised excellant corporate control and lived up to a good set of corporate morals without being forced to when they walked away from the Yelp deal once they saw how evil and underhanded the business model is. Now they are launching their own model in an open and fair way on an open playing field. Jeremy is asking the government to level the playing field for him to compete fairly against google. Are you kidding me. Shame on you congress for evan listening to this poor excuse for a human being. All you need to do is spend a few hours of your time to research this and you will find the truth. Hey Jeremy how about leveling the playing field with your own business model and letting my real customers post honest reviews without being filtered while only showing the phony negative ones post by Yelp elites or Yelpe Elite wannabees who you reward with high priced perks.
^^^ESBP^^^
You do make a good point. Yelp’s ad rates are much higher than Google for restaurants and their sales technique is a bit threatening. Essentially they want to be a search engine for restaurants which are among the highest search. Yelp calls businesses and says, “We have this many reviews on you, want to advertise?” They used restaurant customers for the bait.
OpenTable, Yelp, Google- all trying to get a piece of 550,000 restaurants and our customers.
google gives people free websites: blogs or wikis. thanks to their acquisitions of blogspot and jotspot. does google claim ownership of this “content”? no!
yelp lets people post stuff on their site, then yelp claims ownership of it via terms and conditions no one reads. “it’s ours, we own it!” then they have the gall to charge others for access to this “content”. when the largest search engine said no, they jump on an opportunity to whine about this as part of microsoft’s antitrust tactic against google.
yelp is not a google competitor. nor is nextag. (nextel?) are these companies making search better? they are not even trying.
google is no angel, but c’mon, if we’re talking evil, yelp is the devil himself.
Read Google’s Terms.
If you sign up for a Google account, you do give them a license to your content. It’s perpetual and it’s irrevocable. They can modify the content. They can edit the content. They can share it with other companies. You’ve given them the right to do these things and you cannot change your mind and revoke it later on.
I like that Google pioneers a lot of great things but they’ve certainly been on the bad side of things at times, and this Yelp situation I believe is one of those times.
If Google wasn’t SO dominant in search, none of this would matter – it only matters because they’re in that dominant position and companies like Microsoft have received the wrath of government in similar situations. You simply can’t do whatever you want when you’re in the position where so many rely on you.
In response to Bfitz. I am not in the restauraunt business. I have high end lighting showrooms. 99% of my demographic never even heard of Yelp. The problem is they took one obscure review from over 3 years ago and have manged to get it to consistently come up #1 or #2 when you google the name of my business. They than used that to try and blackmail me into a $4,200 contract. The customer base we are serving who love us can’t post any positive reviews because they are not yelpers and every one is systematically filtered yet. They also sell my bad review to my competitors. They called my competitors and said “Hey look your competitor has this bad review, if you pay us when a customer searches for them and sees the bad review we’ll put your ad prominent as an alternative. They are protected under laws I don’t understand. I can not remove my business from Yelp. So they can slander me and use that slander to obtain revenue and I am powerless to respond. Now someone with a bigger stick than yelp; Google; decides to stand up for what is right, do the right thing and they are investigated by congress who brings in as cmon so eloquently put it “The Devil Himself” to testify against the very corporation who is trying to do governments job and actually level the playing field so the hard working small business person has a fighting chance. Yelp is the devil himself and congress is doing their bidding.
Google should be split into a smaller size so the small Company’s would compete against each other so they will not aim in controlling the internet and filling their pockets with money – google is way to BIG and evil – cut it down to size
I prefer People’s Choice in charge of search engine…
Yelp should be brought up on racketeering charges themselves. Their predatory extortion of businesses across the nation are well documented. Seriously, this is one business I wouldn’t mind seeing de-indexed by Google completely, so fuck em.
They are the wrong ones to use as an example of Googleopoly…
Now… the Travel sector.. they definitely have some legitimate concerns, as do a few others.
I’m not saying the Googleopoly is ok, just that Yelp is scum and not a good example.
It’s very interesting. As you read through all the posts in relation to this article you see intelligent thoughtful opinions on both sides of Google. Yet you clearly see multiple posts about Yelp from people that have been victimized by Yelp. I’ve been following this for a couple years now. I’ve never seen a single post anywhere from anyone communicating a personal experience where they were targeted by and exploited by Google. People have philosophical opinions on Google for sure. I’ve seen complaints that they shouldn’t be selling ads for pornographic web sites or deliver results that would help terrorists build a bomb or plan an attack. Yelp on the other hand uses Google as a tool of fear and intimidation against small business people, targets them personally with a highly incentivized sales force and punishes them mercilessly if they don’t hand over the money. Story after personal story after personal story has been posted for years documenting this abuse by Yelp and yet congress chooses to investigate Google. This is the way our system is supposed to work when it is functioning properly. Google sees the exploitive business model of Yelp and decides to launch it’s own with a model that is fair and moral knowing how easy it will be to win over the market from these blackmailing thieves and congress is thinking of somehow stopping them.
@ESBP
I hear your story often.
The question is who is being hurt here? Because if it is the small businesses which buy the advertising at both G and Y, Yelp is far worse.
BFitz. I’m too moral to be a good business person. From strictly a financial point of view, I would be better off to simply pay Yelp. That is what most small businesses have done. You understand you can’t beat them so you pay them and use the very exploitive business model you despise to make more money. Both John Taylor and Lauren Jacks told me very clearly if I paid them than my non-yelping customers reviews would NOT be filtered out and that the negative reviews would slowly become less prominent and eventually disappear. But If I didn’t pay them all my customers reviews would be filtered out. So I’m stubborn and would not submit to such blackmail and the result is my business has been severley damaged due to no fault of our own and many, many of my hard working employees have been victimized. I should just pay them. it would be a better business decision. If I was in business back in the day when organized crime originally developed this strategy of demanding protection money, my children would have ended up fatherless. Now they’ll just go to state schools rather than more expensive private colleges. It’s a constant struggle between morality and money. A struggle I think Google has done a magnificent job of managing and should be held up as a great example of corporate morality to most other corporations of today who have lost that struggle to the forces of greed and selfishness.
@ Exploited Small Business Person, Enjoyed reading your perspective. Ron Silver said, businesses need to take hold of their online reputation, just for the reason that people love to take action and complain when their experience is less than satisfactory. When everything is in order and the customer is satisfied, it’s okay to ask them to post a good review! They don’t think of it on their own. You’re not the only business. Can you get one of your many satisfied customers to post a good review?
Yelp employs “800 people throughout the country. More than 60 million
consumers use Yelp every month.”
Wow! That’s enough to make any company go off the rails with jealousy! Guess Google stumbled into that category.
Yelp’s business ranks legitimately in Google. It’s hard to build quality content! Yelp’s business model allowed it to build a great user-submit content over time that is impossible to duplicate.
That doesn’t mean it’s okay for Google to appropriate Yelp’s content! Google can start from scratch and build its own content, just like everybody else who they index. Leveraging its power as the biggest search engine to exploit Yelp’s content is not just unethical, it supplies damming testimony to Google, just like @ MHB said above, which is worse with regard to this case: Google may have legitimate defense against the other complainers like Nextag, but this obvious infringement gives the government ammo.
How much effort does Google employ to really combat online theft of content? @ MHB has someone himself who scrapes entire articles and posts them on his blog full of ads.
Sorry the education system has let you down, content scrapers, but that’s not a license to steal! Content scrapers are scum.
Louise, Well written. I have to admit I am not knowledgable enough about these issues you have articulated so well to really comment. Google could very well be pushing the boundries as you describe. The only thing I can testify to with certainty is my own experience. Look at my account on Yelp. It is filled with many, many, many great reviews from our customers. Real customers who posted honest reviews and were filtered out. We have made some process because prior to the first class action lawsuit those positive reviews simply disappeared. But how many people will ever see the filtered reviews. And they don’t count towards your overall star rating. My only choice is to pay them. And how do you square the Yelp elite issue. Ok they are not handed checks directly to post reviews at the bidding of Yelp but they recieve a status with perks that are extremely motivating. It’s human nature. A sales guy comes in and says come on Bill let’s go to lunch. Being polite you don’t want to say no. He’s a nice guy, you have a nice lunch and now he wants an order, you are far more motivated to not only give him the order but the order HE wants with the goods that earn him the highest commission etc. So a Yelp elitist get’s a free private party with food, cocktails and cooking lessons with the famous chef from Rialtos and now an agressive incentivized rep wants to expand his business to lighting stores so he reaches out to a Yelp elite buddy and asks him to visit some local lighting stores and post some reviews to get things going. Is this OK because they invested so much in developing a great web site. The Nazi party in Germany after a crushing defeat in WWI invested tremendous resources into gaining control of Germany answering the calls of the people for nationalism, a better life for the working man, restoring Germany to greatness. They had millions of supporters and beneficiaries just like Yelp. Does that mean that because they were able to gather tremendous resources and create an extremely powerful machine, with broad based support, that once they turned that machine towards the systematic elimination of anything or anyone that stood in their way that we should have just sat back and let them under the guise of “well they do bring a lot to the table”.
Jeremy Stoppelman the CEO of Yelp should be on the hot seat in front of Senate antitrust hearing.
Yelp’s review algorithm is as much a mystery as Google’s Search algorithm. Stoppelman says this is necessary to prevent business owners from hiring shill reviewers. Check out 2009 article that appeared in the East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper in Oakland, California. The article, “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0,” suggested that Yelp salespeople, like Mafia foot soldiers, were threatening businesses with bad reviews if they did not buy a sponsorship package.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635
@ Exploited Small Business Person, You’re right! Look at this from Wikipedia:
In February, 2010, two law firms filed a class action lawsuit accusing Yelp of “extortion” on behalf of a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California that made similar claims.[40] Partially in response to these allegations and in a move to increase transparency, Yelp now shows which reviews get filtered by its filtering algorithm.[3]
Another form of illegitimate review concerns people who have never visited an establishment. In July 2010, American chef Graham Elliot’s sandwich shop Grahamwich had already received a negative one-star-review from a user complaining that the not-yet-opened restaurant had ruined his “pleasant walk”
Thank you for saying, “well-written.” Praise is few and far between, it’s nice when someone doles some out. I am humbled by YOUR knowledge of Yelp. Outside of stumbling upon a review site now and then and reading its complaint linked to on Forbes, I didn’t know too much about it! You said, “Look at my account on Yelp.” You want to email me the link? louise@swimfishie.com .
“Google is no longer in the business of sending people to the best sources of information on the Web,” “It now hopes to be a destination market itself”
=====
The operative word is PLATFORM
It will be interesting to see how many **dominant** Platforms emerge and what they charge NEW (noob) Top Level Domain Registries to carry their channels
No, it is not Alt Root it is Alt Platform – different protocols, different transports (wireless), different services people desire
domains are a tiny piece of those Platforms
3D Platforms should challenge Google’s 1980s technology
@Louise
I’m glad Yelp employs 800, but the restaurant industry which it relies on is the largest employing private industry in the nation. There are 170,000 food service workers in Arizona alone and Yelp with offices here will not even support the Arizona Restaurant Association who represents these people and their employers.
Also think twice before you call their content quality. I am sure ESBP serves hundreds of customers a week, yet this one review is so exposed. In my own business I have served 900,000 meals and have a 170 Yelp reviews. Assume they are all 1 star and all accurate, we make mistakes. But do 170 experiences represent the truth of the typical experience. Those reviews are .00081 of customers served. “Yelpers” are often a certain breed who thrive on something wrong. Also, many reviews are from a demographic which the business was not meant for. See Bill Tanners well written book “Click.”. He points out a real scenario where a yelp reviewer is 22 and gives a high end restaurant a bad review. Then a 45 year old searches for the restaurant, finds yelp and the 1 star and does not go. It’s not fiction, it happens all the time. A friend has a restaurant in DC that is 25 years old doing 8 million a year in sales, off the charts and obviously doing something right for ten million plus customers served. He has 100 yelp reviews and 2 stars and when you Google his restaurant yelp comes up on top. How many future customers is he loosing? Then Yelp calls and says, “want to advertise?” LOL!
They do not deserve to be at the top of the 5 million searches a month for restaurants. Their content makes ehow look like the bible. The search engines are what they are and at least Open Table provides a service. Yelp’s real customers are the businesses who hate them. We don’t hate them because the allow free speech. We hate them because they make the rarity seem the norm and want the businesses being used to pay them.
Bfitz see that is exactly what happened to me. I own high end lighting showrooms. My customers want an alternative to the big boxes and want to come into a showroom to see a very large selection of various brand names, families, finishes, glass treatments etc. and than want to be able to special order custom finishes or combinations or matching pieces etc. So Lyn F. comes in and wants me to be a big box with everything in stock, wants to dictate the strategy I employ to meet my customers desires, wants to change it to meet her own singular selfish needs and than completely rips me giving me a permanent one star review that continues to come up #1 or #2 on Google and I have no ability to respond or change that false perception. Yelp is laughing all the way to the bank, and now asking Congress to drive the brinks truck for them.
@Louise here is the link for my Danvers store where I have had the major problem
http://www.yelp.com/biz/lightn-leisure-danvers#query:lightnleisure this is the link for my Kingston store http://www.yelp.com/biz/lightn-leisure-kingston-2#query:lightnleisure and this is for my Milford store http://www.yelp.com/biz/lightn-leisure-milford#atb_alias:AboutThisBizHistory/query:lightnleisure . I’ll email them to you also in case these don’t work. Their really is a lot more to Yelp than people realize I think. But that is understandable. It has affected myself and my employees directly in a very powerful way. What has surprised me so much is how many thousands of others just like me are out their with the same story.
Your words aren’t wasted – I am enlightened!
As an aside, isn’t it nice how greedy companies who exploit their customers, instead of reward them, receive poetic justice in the news? I’m thinking about Netflix raising its prices so that it caused a million people to cancel its service, then the stock tanked. The CEO is backstepping his mistake now!
Here is the solution: Start over. If you didn’t have a reward policy for posting a review when the internet took off so as to head off the “3rd wave,” as Rick Silver calls it: youtube.com/watch?v=7AJQGxv8oRM
Maybe Yelp overstepped its usefulness if it pressured businesses into paying it off. Have YOUR customers do the online review on Google, and offer some kind of reward, like a discount or coupon. It might be worth that kind of investment.
Further, would an investment of a computer terminal in your showroom for customer to create their feedback right there be too big? With the reach of online, maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea, to make it convenient for the customer!
I have a gmail account. The customer leaves his review using a gmail account. Here is the first review I posted:
Mike’s Auto Repair
It needs 3 reviews for the star rating to stick.
If Google is going to favor its own reviews, having reviews on Google INSTEAD of Yelp! is going to offer a more balanced overview of your company in the long run.
Here is the link to Rick Silver again:
Online reviews. A Tsunami for Canadian Small business
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AJQGxv8oRM
– I love it! You go, Rick! 🙂
Okay, I’ll look up your links.
@esbp: you are not too moral to do good business. if you posted the name of your company i’d bet you’d gain a few customers just from readers of this blog.
time for a rant. apologies to anyone offended.
google has a lot of power. they “scrape” the entire web (at least as much as anyone could get access to). they cache it. for the non-tech folks, cache means copy. plain and simple. they copy every last page of “content” they can.
wait! copyright infringment!
well, yes. but that’s the nature of the web. how does data move from point a to point b? it’s _copied_ at multiple points along the way. and saving a copy is _always_ possible. it can be done. and it’s not difficult.
google has been sued for copyright infringment on several occasions and each time the courts have said, “no foul”. it may be because the courts see the big picture. the web is a very _public_ medium. and data is replicated many, many times over. that’s how the data travels.
ok, let’s assume search engines are evil. they are copyright infringers of epic proportion.
so then how are you going to find anything on the web? either you “scrape” or someone else does it for you. there are hundreds of millions of websites. more sites than you can possibly look at in a lifetime. how are you going to find stuff? word of mouth? wait for the newspaper to write about them? wake up.
why do people use google? because it’s _useful_.
if you upload “content” to a server connected to the internet, it has already been copied once. and it will be copied again, and again. if you want your “content” to stay only in certain places that you control, do _not_ digitise it and upload it to a web server with no password protection (that’s pretty much 99% of web servers). wake up!
search engines are going to make a copy. anyone who understands computers can make a copy. and the courts are not going to be sympathetic when you cry foul.
anyone who tells you they keep your “content” on a web server and can protect your content from being copied is _lying_. password protecion might give you an argument in court, but by then it will be too late. thousands of nerdy teenagers can get access to almost any web server, password or not, and they will spread what they find far and wide. wake up.
yelp does not own any “content”. they are a receptacle. they solicit user comments. then they sell access to these comments (or they take bribes from businesses to censor comments). yelp commenters do not get paid for their work. just as people who write for blogs like huff post, they are free labour. wake up.
google has a lot of power. they could be much more evil than they are. they have all the web cached away and ready to be delivered _fast_ via their own cdn. who else has that?
their role is to give you access to the web’s content. you don’t have to access the web through google. you can do your own “scraping” and fend off the knee-jerk reactionists who still do not understand how digital information works. google does not charge you to access the content they have stored. they don’t try to license it to others (as yahoo does). they could. but they don’t. again, they _could_. but they don’t. wake up.
what’s the solution to all of this? as yet, there is none.
but we won’t find one until more (moral) people besides the nerdy teenagers wake up and start learning more about computers, no matter how painful that may be. education is the way forward. knee-jerk reactionists who don’t want to learn can take a hike.
@cmon Just one point How about Yelp Elite? It’s not direct payment but these people get access to free parties, free food, free cocktails, free cooking lessons, access to the hottest resteraunts, face time with famous chefs, it’s not direct payment but…. In Jeremys testimony this past week to congress he asks for a level playing field “It would be one thing if these efforts were conducted on a level playing field, but the reality is they are not.” How is it a level playing when Yelp elite can be persuaded through perks towards certain types of posts and yet my own real customers can’t post a review. Right now I have no alternative. Yelp is the only review site for non-resteraunts. My customers can’t post positive reviews on Yelp. If Google is stopped from entering this market than congress will be doing the exact same thing to me that Jeremy is asking them to prevent from happening in relation to Google. If Google is allowed to continue in this endeavor my customers will at least have an alternative to freely post. Right now Jeremy is the one exploiting his monopoly at the expense of small business people while asking congress to protect him in this endeavor.
@Louise. We don’t need to offer incentives for positive reviews. We printed a post card and have them in our stores asking people to post reviews for us good or bad so we could improve our business. The result was that many, many customers posted great five star reviews but Yelp systematically filtered out every single one. We are a pretty unusual business. We’ve been here in Boston thirty years. We don’t pay commisions or have any other incentives for our employess other than to service our customers with complete respect and honesty and let them make their own informed decisions. We have terminals available in our stores that customers use all the time. We tell customers you don’t have to go back and forth to shop us. Sit down, check out our prices etc. If you can find a better value someplace else we don’t blame you. That is why it is so frustrating when Yelp has such a stronghold that gives them the ability to present our business in such an inaccurate way and our only option to respond is to pay them.
Switch to Google, man! You have the right idea with the postcard. If you get 3 reviews up there, the star rating applies, and it might have higher placement than Yelp. To hell with Yelp.
I just got off the phone with my friend and neighbor, who was introduced to my mechanic and she has nothing but praise. It’s such a departure dealing with them than many other expensive shops all over the place! She agreed to give a Google review. I am going to send the link. She doesn’t have gmail, but everybody has gmail, so you can put that in your postcard, to sign up with gmail address.
You know what? How about link to your gmail map address from your homepage? It’s too complicated to type in. Ask them to access your google local site from your homepage. Here it is: light ‘n leisure the Danvers location. It has one review – yours. This should be the destination address for your customers to post a review.
BTW, it looks like a beautiful store.
esbp, the problem you describe has always existed in web forums: offering perks for positive reviews. behind the scenes. forum operators abusing their position of influence.
the way i’ve seen it “resolved” is that the people controlling the forum push their influence a little too far and it backfires. someone comes forward and tells their story. and everything crumbles.
is there a site that reviews yelp? who will review the reviewer? sort of like who will watch the watchmen.
do users really care where they get a review from? do they care which search engine they use? it’s all free. users can switch sources in an instant. they probably just use whatever is easiest and most convenient. more experienced users know that web forums are not a true reflection of the real world. if you truly want to assess a local business you cannot do it via the web alone.
moreoever censorship is difficult to accomplish on the web. it sounds like that is yelp’s business model: selective publication. but can yelp really control what users say about listed businesses? the fcc just published its net neutrality rules. different abstraction layer but same theme. censorship is not an easy road. on the web, word spreads quickly and indiscriminantly.
users might just pay attention to stories about corruption at yelp if someone comes forward and tells their story. but as others have said, thanks to microsoft, right now the spotlight is pointed at google, not yelp. big bad google.
just so folks understand the issue…
the trouble with Yelp is that they “weight” their reviews in the first place.
To be completely unbiased (and ethical), they would have to let the reviews balance themselves out – not “filter” them with some “proprietary algorithm… that’s the beginning of their bullshit.
What Yelp does is, plain and simple, blatant extortion. They have a few “negative” reviews come in about a business (which should actually be expected because people that have a negative experience are exponentially more likely to take the time/energy to post a review as those that had a great experience)… but then what happens is that Yelp provides an invisible “weight” to those negatives… even if new positive, glowing, “best thing since sliced bread” reviews come in – Yelp “filters” those off the page. WHY?
BECAUSE: Yelp now has leverage to use to get the business owner to par to “advertise” with Yelp, promising to “tweak/adjust/bias” the filter so that the reviews are actually fair – ONLY if the business owner pays them.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses that have all stated the same thing. It is a protection racket, no different that Chicago and the mob.
Seriously, the only place that scumbag owner of Yelp should have in front of any Congressional hearing should be as a DEFENDANT… not as a credible witness, that’s insane.
If Google really wanted to “do evil” to Yelp, they could (and should, IMO) completely de-list them… but they don’t, and that makes Yelp’s case against Google a farce.
oh and Louise… there’s a review on that link that says:
“Mike is a great guy. And he does excellent work! He’s committed to making Me”
perhaps that’s why he’s doing such excellent work??????
@cartoonz It kills me. Thousands of us with the same story and yet Jeremy with his venture capital millions has the ability to lobby congress in order to level the playing field in his own favor. All we can do is keep fighting and eventually we will win only because we are right. I have a google alert on Yelp and every single article that is posted online, I use the comments thread to tell my story. If we all keep doing that eventually we will win. Why? Because we are telling the truth and Jeremy Stoppleman is Evil. Now I am going to go off topic and rant about the venture capital model. When we want to start a business or grow our business we pay about 38% tax on every dollar of revenue that we create. We might have expenses that exceed that for a period of time creating loss carry forwards but those loss carry forwards are still reduced by every single dollar of revenue. In a venture capital structure those millions that replace the revenue that we would have to sweat for are not taxed. So they get every single dollar of expense to use as losses AND can carry forward for years and years to offset and eliminate taxes on future profits. When that money eventually is paid back to the venture capitalists it is taxed at 15%. So essentially we pay a 23% premium to the government to build our businesses with sweat equity as opposed to venture capital. And who do you think is screaming the loudest that the tax code is unfair to the rich?
@ ESBP, Good for you, paying your full share of taxes! There is venture capital – thanx for explaining! – or there are tax havens that companies like Microsoft take advantage of:
“Things were rosy in the giant software company’s just-ended fiscal fourth quarter, which produced record sales of nearly $17.4 billion . . . But for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and foreign tax authorities, things weren’t so rosy. Microsoft reported only . . . 7 percent of its $6.32 billion in pre-tax profit.”
– Microsoft use of low-tax havens drives down tax bill, Reuters
Nice! Thing is, you greedy corporations, you can’t take it with you. Pay your share!
In recent years many multinationals — including pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and technology companies like I.B.M. — have cut their United States taxes by booking increasing amounts of their profits abroad. Mr. Levins proposal would require all United States multinationals to provide more information in their regulatory filings, including a country-by-country breakdown of their sales, employment, financing and tax payments.
The bill would also prevent companies and hedge funds from escaping American taxes by filing incorporation documents abroad and declaring themselves foreign companies. During public hearings in 2008, Mr. Levins subcommittee heard testimony from three hedge funds — Highbridge Capital, Angelo Gordon and Maverick Capital — which were incorporated in the Cayman Islands, but had no offices or employees there. Mr. Levins proposal would allow the I.R.S. to define a domestic company as one that is managed and controlled within the United States.
“The idea that we have all these companies that avoid paying taxes through all these gimmicks is disgraceful,” said Mr. Levin, the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “And that we tolerate it is disgraceful.”
– Senate Bill Seeks to Raise Revenue by Closing Tax HavensBy DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
NYTimes
Party’s over. Party’s over. Party’s over.
Everyone who is surprised by this please raise your hands…
Thought so.
The Google Mantra according to me: “All Your traffic Are Belong To Us!”
And Mr. Levin is… shockingly…. a democrat… Pardon my sarcasm but I think this is a far fairer way to reduce our deficit than reducing the tax on capital gains and dividends to zero as Mr. Romney is proposing.
The author of this article, Scott Cleland, will be a FEATURED speaker at T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
Thanks for the article Mike!! Thank you Linked In for making the connection!
Rick
More than welcome
I assume I will be getting my normal 0% commission on this
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