Don’t be Evil

“Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman joined the firing squad and told senators that “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 site itself for one vertical market after another, including news, shopping, travel, and now, local business reviews.”

Stoppelman said that Google had licensed Yelp’s content, then tried to buy the company after the license ended. When that failed, Google simply scraped Yelp’s local review results and incorporated bits of them into its local search products. When Yelp sent Google a letter demanding that it stop this practice, Google “informed us that it would cease the practice only if we agreed to be removed from Google’s Web search index, thereby preventing Yelp from appearing anywhere in Google Web search results.” (Google’s outside counsel said Yelp was “micromanaging” where its content would be used and that “extra engineering” was needed to allow Yelp result to appear in general search but not in location search.)”

“Ars Technica

I guess the upside on this is that at least this time they are not actively and directly screwing the end-consumer. Just indirectly.

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