Yelp Complains About Google Results For Restaurants Years After Demanding They Get Paid For Content Showing Up in Searches

The CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman, has gone to
regulators in Europe over Google, filing a complaint against the
way the search engine organizes results of searches for restaurants
and restaurant reviews.

Google is working on an anti-trust
settlement with European Union regulators about the way it
presents results and claims that it prioritizes Google-branded
results first. As a final agreement comes close to fruition,
critics in Europe are getting louder. Now Yelp’s CEO has joined the
chorus. As TechCrunch reported:

Documents leaked to TechCrunch from inside Yelp allege
that Google is manipulating its search results to
favor Google+ content over Yelp content. The
materials accuse Google of blatantly highlighting its own
products in searches made in the US but not in Europe in order to
avoid angering EU regulators who are reviewing Google antitrust
complaints.

The source tells me these screenshots and study are what’s being
passed around internally at Yelp to demonstrate that Google’s
tactics are unfair. Yelp recently joined a formal complaint about
the leniency of an EU antitrust settlement with Google,
the New York Times reported today, and my source says
these documents helped inspired this action.

Google and Yelp have some history. In 2009 Google tried to buy
the company for more than half a billion dollars but Yelp
ultimately walked away
from the deal.

SlashGear explained more of their history
during a 2011 dust-up:

According to Stoppelman’s testimony [in a congressional
hearing], after a license to use Yelp’s review content in its
results expired in 2007, Google first sought its own user reviews
and then, in 2010, began automatically including content from Yelp
without a new license agreement. When Yelp objected, Stoppelman
claims, Google said it would only stop if the review site agreed to
be removed from the overall search index.

So it sounds like initially Yelp wanted to get paid by Google
for being included in the search engine’s results. Google tried to
buy Yelp in their attempts to expand into providing local content
for users (Google eventually
bought Zagat). Now that Google’s local search results have
evolved to provide a more comprehensive search result about local
places, one that incorporates Google and other content to
provide.

As Google Chairman Eric Schmidt explained in 2011 at the same
hearing where Stoppleman complained about Yelp’s Google placement,
“the cost of going elsewhere is zero, and users can and do use
other sources to find the information they want.” It’s
disheartening, if not surprising, that Yelp’s CEO would turn to
government to force a business that’s become a competitor to act in
a way advantageous to his own company at their expense.