"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it's really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over.
Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same.
Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
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]
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
> The Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me.
At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
"$10 off your next service if you give us a review on Yelp" is just the tip of an iceberg of complaints people have about online review systems, including Yelp.
I was once traveling and some friends found a highly reviewed place on Yelp. When we got there it turned out the glowing reviews were all written by the owner's son. At least he felt bad enough about it to give us free dessert.
> Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game
I assume you mean it's among the hardest to game except by paying Yelp to remove negative reviews - that's a pretty important caveat when it comes to trustworthiness.
I'm almost entirely de-Googled at this point, but I make an exception specifically to avoid Yelp, which somehow manages to be even worse than Google within its niche.
I typically search for things "-yelp". They're an annoying and mostly useless.
I haven't bothered to look in a long time, but the reviews I've seen are obviously bad. I can find menus on the restaurant's real page. The locality views are worse than, say, Apple maps. There's just no reason to use them.
Add in that they harm the livelihood of restaurants owned by people I like, and yeah, they're another crap site that continues to be annoying by trying to get in between me and someone who wants to feed me.
Completely disagree. Reviews generated by "give a good review and we'll give you a prize" and "I'd hate to see you hit with a bunch of bad reviews because you didn't pay us more money" are completely worthless and are the core of Yelps business model. It's the definition of easy-to-game and untrustworthy.
Hardest to game is like lesser evils. Lesser evils remain evil, as hard games remain played.
I personally value direct interactions with people I do business with more than ever in my life. Too many middle companies all working some angle to make more than the value they may actually deliver.
Well, a few things:
Trust in all this kind of service is reaching a low ebb. We keep finding incidents where the behavior is not as represented.
Frankly, the money might be too good.
And that's fine. Is what it is, people do what they do
I am stepping back, reevaluating these kinds of value propositions, and recommending peers do the same.
As far as I recall, Yelp predates Google having any of those features at all.
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
Yelp as a social network is actually pretty cool, if you get their elite status for the year you get invited to some pretty fun free events, and I know they've done socially distanced ones since the pandemic, I heard about a murder mystery somewhere. Now that I don't participate in that I don't really use the platform often.
We drove up the Oregon coast and my GF used Yelp to find good places for us to stop and eat. I was frankly astonished as, like you, I've found Yelp pretty useless at best.
There was an xkcd about this, but i've found anything below 4.5 stars is mediocre. Above that you find a better probability of a good meal, but it's still just a probability.
I find it servers as a good filter for the awful stuff, which is what I really care about when travelling.
I have a friend who has run a restaurant for decades with a customer base that is almost entirely regulars. She has encouraged us to leave bad yelp reviews as she has found "yelpers" (different from people who simply consult yelp) to be a pain in the neck...plus wants space to be available for the regulars.
- Yelp's founder on why Google is a problem.