Google In Talks To Buy Yelp 95
There have been many rumors floating around concerning a possible buyout of Yelp by Google, but it appears that at least a few details have escaped, painting this as a much more serious possibility. Pointing the needle to something north of $500 million, the acquisition would mean a substantial step into localized business for Google. "Google has been showing greater interest in the local business market in the United States. It has expanded its profile pages for local businesses, which include location and hours, maps and reviews from other Web sites. In June, Google gave local businesses the ability to manage what people see on their profile pages, similar to what Yelp does. Google has been reaching out to local businesses with simpler ways to advertise on the search engine. It is also distributing stickers that businesses post in their windows and passers-by can scan with cellphones to get coupons or information about the business. The deal between Google and Yelp could still unravel, one person said, particularly if another acquirer comes forward now that details have leaked."
Does this remind anyone of... (Score:4, Funny)
CueCat?
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It is also distributing stickers that businesses post in their windows and passers-by can scan with cellphones to get coupons or information about the business.
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I'm not that much into cell phones either, but I wouldn't go as far as calling them useless.
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Not really, because you can actually use the window codes while out & about. If the cuecat had been wireless with internal storage, or (like a phone) been entirely usable on its own, it might have survived.
As it was, it made a decent contact barcode scanner(I still have a declawed USB model), but lousy for the intended use.
Re:Does this remind anyone of... (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Reminds me of QR Codes which are very common in Japan, as most phones can read them, and extract some info like a URL.
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One of these days (Score:3, Funny)
Google is just going to buy the internet.
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The Internet had a big part in an episode of The IT Crowd --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg [youtube.com]
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'Pointing the needle to something north of $500 million'
So is this more or less than eastsouthwest of 50 cents?
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You'll probably get marked as "Troll", although what you say is completely true.
Recommendation sites like that are nearly useless. The last time I tried it, somebody recommended a fancy and expensive restaurant and raved about how great the food was. My wife and I went, and the food was utter shit. Extremely small portions, way the fuck too expensive, and it didn't even taste good.
Then we checked another restaurant that we like, and found numerous negative recommendations that didn't correspond at all to th
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ur doin it rong (Score:3, Informative)
Of course people's tastes differ, but yelp can give you a ton of information from a bunch of different perspectives; sure it's a challenge to sort through it all but if you just read the first review and treat as gospel of course you will be disappointed. But if you look at negative and positive reviews and use them to learn about the restaurant (rather than just about someone's opinion of the restaurant) it can be really helpful. After a while you can "friend" reviewers whose comments you find informativ
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yelp is probably the best site I've found for reviews - no reviewed location has flawless reviews and they spot shills/remove them quite fast.
You are correct that everyone's tastes differ, but that isn't anything for or against the site.
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I had 11 positive reviews and one "eh" review, they called me and asked me for money, I refused and 4 of my good reviews disappeared completely and three bad reviews appeared all within the space of four days of their call.
The best part was that two of the bad reviewers had obviously never been to my business, the things they talked about are completely wrong.
Yelp is a scam, it had potential but at th
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You can report that to yelp and the users would be banned. Yelp has a system in place for that, and I've dealt with crap like that coming up myself (frequent yelper). You could flag the bad reviews as shills and watch them be taken down in a day, tops.
Re:good (Score:5, Funny)
Does anybody else find eating out unattractive? I went out to dinner with a hot chick and all I could think about the whole time was the food being enqueued into my bowels, turning into shit, and finally being squirted out my anus into a small pool of water. Then, no matter how well each of us would wipe, there would still be trace amounts of feces in our underleg regions. The plan was to go clubbing afterward, which would cause us to sweat booty juices. I knew for a fact that both of us don't wear underwear on a regular basis.
I tried to explain this all to her to her as she was eating her filet mignon, but she dropped her fork and knife and crossed her legs before she asked me to take her home. She never called again
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Where are my mod points when I need them. Someone please mod parent Funny (or Hilarious if that's an option).
I don't find Yelp very helpful (Score:1, Informative)
most posts are friends of the business owner or simply whiners.
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I guess it depends on where you live. I did live in Austin and there were tons of reviews for everything. I move to San Antonio and most places only have 2 to 4 reviews. So the chance of 1 or 2 business owner reviews that has a greater influence than when there's 40 reviews of the place. I mainly use it just to find a certain kind of business. If I want a place that mainly sells hamburgers and don't want generic fast food, I just search for hamburgers on yelp. You do have to read the reviews though ca
oh geeze... (Score:1)
I'm sure the EU will have something to say about this.
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Yelp only operates in the US.
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no, there is an yelp UK as well. [yelp.co.uk] I still don't get why the EU would care, though.
$ yelp --help (Score:4, Funny)
$ yelp --help
Usage:
yelp [OPTION...] GNOME Help Browser
Help Options:
-?, --help Show help options
--help-all Show all help options
--help-gtk Show GTK+ Options
--help-bonobo-activation Show Bonobo Activation options
--help-gnome Show GNOME options
--help-gnome-session Show session management options
Application Options:
-p, --private-session Use a private session
--with-cache-dir Define which cache directory to use
--display=DISPLAY X display to use
Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
"It is also distributing stickers that businesses post in their windows and passers-by can scan with cellphones to get coupons or information about the business. "
The business could just do free wifi w/the info on the "accept" page.
It's not like I'm going to have a signal anyway, regardless of what A morbidly obese Luke Wilson tells me.
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The business could just do free wifi w/the info on the "accept" page
I've pushed just this idea on a few businesses. For a relatively low fixed rate, any storefront could get timely advertisements out passersby who need a wifi internet connection and who might just be interested in their products/ services. Win win for everyone.
Sorry, but this is stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
500 million for a very simple website that has people reviewing restaurants and shit? Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).
What is this world coming to?
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
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Yeah I don't know what it is. If Google pumped out their own service like this, built it into all their apps, I'm sure they could even be innovative and make it better than what Yelp has done.
Seriously, put your dev team on it for a week and you'll have a bigger base than Yelp does by the end of the quarter, without having spent half a billion dollar.
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If you are better than Google at estimating the value of Yelp and costs of replicating it, you should be able cream them.
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Go to Yelp [yelp.com]. Look at what it is.
Go to Google, Enter Google Maps. Type in "Restaurants in "
Notice the Ratings and reviews all along the left bar.
Tell me, what does Yelp Offer that Google does not have already coded. (Keep in mind that Google has tons of services already built, as you can see here [google.ca].
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I have no idea. I'm happy to concede that the people involved in this at Google have a better picture of the situation than I do.
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Well yeah, exactly. I wonder what the motivation is. Is it the namesake and user base? It seems like Google could pull alot more if it marketted more, instead of buying out smaller competition.
Could this be an evil act and I'm just blinded by my love for Google?
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What do you mean "yeah exactly"? A little ways up the page you are ranting about how stupid it is.
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That was before I discovered that they already have the system in place. I thought they were doing it because they didn't want to do the work.
Now I see they've done the work and it's just buying out a competitor.
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also, I understand you apparently have a love/hate with yelp per your last many comments, but what's the issue you have with them? I don't get it.
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Yelp doesn't seem to be anything special. I haven't used them before, but it looks like just another review site, in which there are dozens out there. Perhaps because I haven't used it fully I don't see the great beauty it has to offer Google.
My Love/Hate is really with Google, not Yelp. I like Google, they provide me with a ton of free services like webmail, maps, and a decent search engine. It seems like anything they touch turns to gold and they constantly try to make the world a better place.
Then they g
If you love/hate google so much (Score:2)
you should go yelp about it!
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Looks like google already owns yelp...they provide the hardest to develop part of the website, they provide the revenue, and they provide most of the traffic (I rarely go to yelp first for a review...I search for the restaurant and then click the
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Yes, perhaps he could. Except for that money thing.
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But Google is so incompetent that they are wasting $500 million dollars, surely they can't stand up to a more efficient competitor.
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Isn't that what Google does when they buy other online services? Restructure it to integrate with their other online offerings?
Presumably, their dev team is already doing other things (and,
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Yes, that is all fucking obvious and we now that.
Just can't see why $500m. Sure, you save a lot of time, but $500m worth?
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what you're missing (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
Yes. It's offering a social networking site for such people as well as a user-generated database of information about the restaurants (and other businesses) in their neighborhoods. It's like facebook meets wikipedia for food and drink nerds. It's incredibly useful in a large city where new restaurants and bars come and go constantly, and where there is a large mobile population of internet-savvy people with disposable income. People post photos and the reviews range from entirely vapid to densely informative. It's an opportunity for every wannabe food critic to write about what they love (or hate) and actually get readers without having to go pro ... (It's especially useful in a city like LA where print food journalism is already dominated by a single writer!) You can learn a lot about places that you would never get from a menu or the website or a newspaper review. It's not just restaurants, either -- bars, auto mechanics, bowling alleys, doctors, strip clubs, medical marijuana "dispensaries," and universities all have extensive pages of reviews. And you can network with writers you think are helpful or entertaining. Some networks organize parties and group dining events. It's great for travelers too -- I really like to eat out at izakayas (Japanese "tapas" pubs), for example; whenever I travel anywhere in the US that has some Japanese population, I always check yelp to find such places and read their reviews. I don't know if google owning yelp will be good or bad - I kind of like it the way it is now, though I could see its potential to be much cooler. Either way, though, people who use it regularly see a lot of value in it and I'm guessing that google sees a lot of value in those networks of generally young, educated hipsters with enough money to go out to eat all the time and enough free time to spend generating content (for free).
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Thanks for the info.
I don't mean this in an offensive way, but - it looks like an "American" thing. Where I live, and in the several European countries I've been to, people don't go out to eat (if they do, any random fast food will do) and a bar is just a bar. I personally cannot even remember the last time I've been to a restaurant. It's cheaper and tastier to simply eat at home.
I still don't see how information on Yelp could be worth more than 1-2 million instead of 500.
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Yes, everyone knows Europe is not known for its restaurant culture. Oh wait, I meant bizarro Europe.
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Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
Yes. It's offering a social networking site for such people as well as a user-generated database of information about the restaurants (and other businesses) in their neighborhoods. It's like facebook meets wikipedia for food and drink nerds.
The problem that I have is that Google has all of this stuff already available to them, they simply haven't consolidated it into a single Application. They have social networking sites (Like Youtube even), they have a user-generated database of information about restaurants (see Google Maps for reviews on businesses).
This appears either to be "2 lazy 2 copy&paste code" or anti-competitive.
yelp as a brand (Score:3, Insightful)
anti-competitive maybe, but if you think this is just about copying code, you're missing the point. When yuppies in NY, Chicago, LA, SF, NOLA, Vegas, and other cities in the U.S. get home from a great (or terrible) meal (or strip club or trip to the gynecologist), many of them want to "yelp" their experiences. They don't say "I am going to run home and google map the shit out of this place!" Reviews on google maps are useful but they are not really part of a social network; they are far more anonymous an
Re:Sorry, but this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, what am I missing?
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, Mr. Smartypants, and take a couple of months to clone Yelp and find out. Better yet, take four months and make a site that is twice as good! If it's so easy, then do it. Half a billion dollars for four months of work! What are you waiting for?
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Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, Mr. Smartypants, and take a couple of months to clone Yelp and find out. Better yet, take four months and make a site that is twice as good! If it's so easy, then do it. Half a billion dollars for four months of work! What are you waiting for?
If you are going to pay me during that time, I'm all for it. However, I don't see the point - the American market is taken, and this site concept definitely wouldn't work in large parts of the rest of the world. I've just asked several friends from Western Europe (ages 20-40), nobody ever heard of Yelp, nobody knows of a similar local site and nobody would care.
The point still stands: the website is shitty and could easily be made functionally better in a very short time. That doesn't mean it would attract
Re:Sorry, but this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
500 million for a very simple website that has people reviewing restaurants and shit? Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).
What is this world coming to?
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
Yelp is the first place I go to when I want to find a new place to eat...it is extremely useful in a big city where there is no way that any other site or publication has reviewed all of the eateries. The tech behind Yelp isn't revolutionary, but it's a pretty slick site to use. more importantly, it basically owns the market for local reviews. Saying that a couple people could clone the site is like saying a couple people could come up with a Gatorade-like drink over the weekend...the response to which would be...So?
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Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).
Your user name is appropriate. Despite what armchair entrepreneurs such as yourself may think, building a highly usable and tuned website, while not difficult, takes a lot more effort than you think, even for "reviewing restaurants and shit". As someone who's spent more than two years building a site similar to Yelp for Beijing, and hearing everyone say "can't anyone just build that and take your business?", I can tell you that you are grossly underestimating the effort involved.
Secondly, getting as many
Sooner or later... (Score:5, Insightful)
...to have progress, the people of earth will have to start owning the search and everything else that Google is into nowadays. Today most people probably think Google is doing a good job (and I'm not saying they aren't), but Google will become a middle man that we'd be better off without. The surfers should be in control of the means of searching. I hope the transition will go smoothly and painlessly.
Re:Sooner or later... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah I've often wondered what the world will be like when Google has a new CEO.
One that likes profits. And instant gratification.
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The people of earth are the people of earth. We could come together using the Internet and Free/Open Source software.
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I don't mean they'd be an oppressor, just that it would at some point become necessary to have an open and free alternative to move things forward, kind of like I believe that to get the best kind of OS, it will have to be Free and open source (and I'm not saying we're there yet when it comes to OS:s, but that proprietary and non-free is not the future).
So... (Score:2)
Is it monopolistic or anti-competitive when Google does it? Will we put Borg implants on Larry Page's face?
This can only end one way (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile the rest of the world will be grateful that Google will not try to extort them for ad revenue to get a good rating.
Will this make Yelp more or less evil? (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, this is a bad idea. A website that seems to get revenue from censorship bribes is not a sustainable enterprise (and yes, I realize I'm making a major assumption here).
Re:Will this make Yelp more or less evil? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I know someone who works for Yelp, and they take free shit from businesses that they've reviewed, which is ethically pretty uncool.
Isn't that exactly how it works with technology reviews at the various game / hardware Web sites?
There was a story about this a year or so ago... (Score:2)
I can't remember where I read it - it may have even been linked here on slashdot - exposing Yelp's sales tactics to restaurants advertising on the sit
Re:There was a story about this a year or so ago.. (Score:5, Informative)
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I've seen tons of negative reviews on yelp. Do you have any evidence that Yelp actually deleted your review based on a bribe?
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But given that article Scareduck linked, it seems like a distinct possibility. All I can base it on is the following:
* My review used to be there
* My review is no longer there
* There is a glowing five star review about that restaurant which actually mentions what time it opens
If you ca
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If you can think of another more likely possibility, based on that information, I'd like to hear it.
Sure.
* server error
* server update
* human error of someone maintaining the pages
* you never actually finished posting it in the first place
There are probably other possibilities; all far more likely than a conspiracy to censor an unfavorable comment about a local business.
What was the local business, anyway, Occam's Shaving Emporium?
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i read somewhere in the last year that Yelp tries to blackmail businesses to "advertise" there or face a ton of negative reviews. i never use it even though i live in NYC. i know the good places or ask someone who knows about a place.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Yelp gets amazing ranking on all of the search engines, and it also has a huge user base of people who are happy to offer reviews for free. Google wants both of these: high page rank that can drive advertising income, and users who are dumb enough to post reviews for free.
A Yelp killer would give the top moderated reviewers a piece of the pie.
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Google already has a review system built into Google Maps for Restaurants and Dentists and anything else Yelp has listed on their site.
I would put my reputation as an estimator on the line to say that Google Maps probably gets more traffic than Yelp.
Buying out the competition so you make more money is anti-competitive. I love Google as much as the next die-hard fan, but everything about this deal sounds like pure evil.
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I don't see this as a buyout. They already link yelp from the maps reviews, so what is the big deal here?
Even if they buy yelp, why does that mean they'd shut it down? yelp has a seriously huge base, and they do a lot more than reviews. If they were to shut down yelp a replacement would come quick, as it's used for an equivalent to meetup too.
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They wouldn't close it down, just like they didn't close down Youtube when they bought it out. Even though they have a competing business (Google Video) - its still all under the same roof generating profits for Google.
Yelp would still run, Google would just be running it, gaining all of their revenue.
Until I see a clear motive for Google doing this, It all just seems a little underhanded.
Its clearly not to acquire their technology or products, they can find a far cheaper solution (500 million is alot of bu
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Google wants [...] high page rank that can drive advertising income
Does Google really need to buy a company to improve their ranking in search engines?
Now Bing has to buy something (Score:2)
Now Bing has to buy something. But what? Local.com? Does Microsoft already have a recommendation service somewhere in its Live system?
Google is like a rich friend (Score:3, Funny)
who buys all kinds of crap without knowing what he's going to do with it.
Yelp == SCAM (Score:5, Interesting)
A few others have made the same remarks. I figured I'd fire back with my own yelp experience from a business side.
We've always been reviewed favorably on yelp. Then earlier this year a competitor decided to get in on the yelp gaming action. This competitor had all of their buddies go out and write unfavorable reviews of us. The review would always go like this..
"Toqers business sucks because of
ABCDEFG
Oh and since they suck, you should to to
X"
X being, a location ran by our competitor. Most of the negative reviews were written by folks with 1 or 2 reviews, no real name or picture. The name and picture thing is important in yelp culture because it's "Real Reviews, by Real People"
Around the same time we started getting calls from yelp salespeople promising if we paid them some outrageous monthly sum, they would make the default sort on our page descending. That way we get all the 5 star reviews first. When we declined somehow the choicest negative reviews floated towards the top.
So we struck back..
I started recruiting my regular customers to start writing their own reviews. My competitor cried foul. I told him I was bringing yelp new users, and there was nothing wrong with that. Me having my customers write good reviews was no worse than him having his friends write false/negative ones.
One of my customers even went as far as to write a review containing a bunch of links to youtube videos. My competitor had said that we were an unlively establishment full of ugly people, and the youtube videos proved that to be completely false.
The flagging wars
So my competitor flagged the review with the youtube links citing yelp policy that "Offsite linking should be limited" That review got taken down. We fired back flagging reviews and citing yelp policy as well. Our competitor made the mistake of writing updates that "Are not new experiences" For example, one girl who became the girlfriend of the leader of these folks initially gave us a great review. When she started getting deep dicked she wrote an update review about how shitty we were. Technically she didn't have a new experience, so she got flagged, review removed. For a while every morning was spent dealing with this bullshit. I tried going through regular yelp channels and it was of no help. I begged yelp "Just take us off your service". They quoted DMCA safe harbor laws. I got sick of it, so I started dropping dox on reviewers, Jeremy Stoppleman, other Yelp Big wigs, etc. Me and some of our regulars started having our own version of photoshop Friday, pasting the faces of some of these douchebags on gay porn and what not. Sure it was childish, but we decided we to could hide behind "DMCA Safe Harbor". Fuck em.
I don't know for sure if that worked, but the slurry of negative reviews stopped. The sort order on our yelp page suddenly changed. The owners son of the business I work at asked me to take down our photoshop friday and dox. Now it seems like we just have a cease fire.
We haven't been asked by yelp again if we want to join their program. Yelp is really sleazy, to me it seems like they condoned our competitors behavior just to pressure us into giving them money.
A lot of old time yelp regulars are giving up on yelp. Even AT&T has given up on them. In their last "Does your network do this?" Iphone commercial, they say "Find a great restaurant" That segment used to feature yelp, but now features Zagat.
If you google "Yelp is a scam" you will find many many websites supporting this. Google please don't make the mistake of buying yelp.
Yelp deletes reviews (Score:5, Interesting)