Yelp and TripAdvisor have teamed up against Google to fight back against what Yelp calls an “unlawful advantage” given to Google+’s search results over its competitors when it comes to local reviews.
On Sunday, Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman appeared on 60 Minutes to participate in a forum dedicating to bashing the most popular search engine. Stoppelman said if he were trying to start Yelp today, he “would have no shot” because “that opportunity has been closed off by Google and their approach.” According to Stoppelman, if you are seen as a competitor to Google, “they will snuff you out.”
“They will make you disappear. They will bury you,” Stoppelman explained.
After Stoppelman’s 60 Minutes appearance, Yelp’s VP of Public Policy, Luther Lowe, ran a blog post related to the site’s partnership with TripAdvisor and other groups to criticize the “unlawful advantage” Google gives its own content.
In the blog post, Lowe shared a video titled “Focus on the User,” reportedly the name of Yelp’s partnership with TripAdvisor.
The video claims Google has “pushed aside its powerful organic algorithms and stopped putting the best possible information in front of us” when people try to search for local information. The first seven pieces of information that appear at the top of the page when users search for local information, according to the video, comes exclusively from Google+ local, which is allegedly a problem.
“But by using Google+ to power these answer boxes, Google disregards the third party ecosystem of local reviews,” the video states, showing photos of the logos for both Yelp and TripAdvisor.
The video goes on to advertise for the Focus on the User Local browser plugin, which replaces the Google+ results with results from sites like Yelp, ZocDoc, and Healthgrades (when searching for a doctor). The video claims those results are a “much better answer” to the question about finding a good pediatrician in New York City, as there are more reviews.
The point of the plugin, as the video states, “is to string together the top local review websites that specialize in offering helpful reviews of local businesses, then letting Google decide how they stack up against one another” instead of relying on Google+ alone. The results, the video says, include the top reviewing sites--including Google+--in order to not bias the results.
The video, however, also claims, “As is the case in most examples we can find, Google believes a third-party website, Yelp in this case, ranks higher than its own Google+-powered content.”
Since the 60 Minutes interview and the publication of the blog post, Stoppelman has been sharing content on his Twitter page asserting that Google is committing illegal behavior. Lowe has been sharing links accusing Google of being a monopoly and accusing organizations of engaging in “intellectually disingenuous attacks” on Yelp for criticizing the company’s position.
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