Key Takeaways
- Yelp has escalated its long-standing feud with Google by filing an antitrust lawsuit, accusing the tech giant of unfairly using its monopoly in search to dominate local results and push its own reviews.
- This legal action follows a recent ruling that declared Google’s search dominance as an illegal monopoly, fueling Yelp’s drive to challenge Google further.
- Yelp’s CEO claims Google traps users in its ecosystem, diverting traffic and ad revenue from competitors like Yelp.
Yelp’s long-running dispute with Google has hit a new high. The popular review site has been clashing with the search giant for years. Back in 2017, Yelp accused Google of unfairly taking its content, especially images, to boost Google’s own search results. Now, Yelp has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, right after a federal judge ruled that Google’s dominance is an illegal monopoly.
This move is the peak of a long-standing rivalry between Yelp and Google. Yelp claims that Google has used its search dominance to take over local searches and push its own reviews to the top, as reported by MarketWatch. Google’s recent legal loss seems to have given Yelp even more motivation to challenge the tech giant.
Yelp Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a blog post announcing the suit that the Mountain View-based company is using its monopoly in search to trap users in its own ecosystem and block them from visiting competing sites. This unfair behavior steals traffic and ad revenue from services like Yelp, Stoppelman added.
The lawsuit is asking the courts to force Google to stop its alleged anticompetitive practices and to pay damages for the harm done. The case has been filed in federal court in the Northern District of California.
An ongoing tussle between Yelp and Google
Yelp has been openly criticizing Google for over a decade. During this time, Yelp has repeatedly voiced frustration over Google using its reviews in their products without offering fair compensation.
Looking back, Yelp and Google were once partners, with Google paying for the rights to use Yelp’s reviews. However, their relationship quickly soured, and Yelp accused Google of taking its content without permission. This behavior violated a 2013 regulatory settlement between Google and other parties, following a complaint Yelp filed with the Federal Trade Commission in 2012. Yelp’s main points were that Google was unfairly using content from other websites, like Yelp, to boost its own services, such as Google Places, and that Google was showing favoritism in search results by excluding competitors. The settlement required Google to stop scraping content from other sites if they opted out, but many saw it as little more than a symbolic punishment.
The recent legal action might have a big impact, especially after a judge in a Department of Justice case ruled that Google’s search dominance amounts to a monopoly. While the August ruling didn’t come with penalties, it’s expected that Yelp’s lawsuit could spark a wave of similar cases from Google’s rivals.
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