• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 28, 2024

Yelp filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in a California federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday. The company alleged self-preferencing of Google’s search offerings after Yelp has spent years of public lobbying against the practice.

This case focuses on Google abusing its illegal monopoly in general search to dominate the local search and local search advertising markets. This action is a continuation of Yelp’s decades-long fight to protect consumer choice and restore fair competition on the internet. 

“Yelp has long fought to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services,” Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a blog post. “With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages, and prevent Google from engaging in anticompetitive practices so that innovation may flourish.”

Google for years degraded local search quality and demoted rivals to grow its market power, Stoppelman write. The filed lawsuit address years of “past misconducts and prevent future self-preferencing behavior.”

In fact, many years that go back to the beginning of Yelp, which Stoppelman founded in 2004. Yelp created a detailed timeline to document how Google limits consumer choice and degrades search results by self-preferencing its own inferior local search product over rival local search providers with better content.

Yelp at one point earned revenue from Google, according to the complaint by signing a two-year licensing agreement in 2005 that allowed Google to feature Yelp’s crowd-sourced reviews and business information on Google’s search page.

Google managed to populate Google Local with photos, addresses, hours, and reviews for local businesses, but Google recognized review content was “critical to winning in local search.” And when the licensing deal came up for renewal, Google informed Yelp that it intended to offer a competing product.

Then Google in 2007 launched a review feature within Google Maps and began competing with Yelp. Prior to the launch, Stoppelman wrote directly to a Google executive requesting that Google remove Yelp’s review and photo content from Google Maps before launching the new feature. Google agreed to do so.

At the time, Google internally acknowledged the risk of its new product offering — it had lost its local search licensing partner in Yelp, and it would likely take time to build up its own set of user reviews, according to the document.

Yelp claims Google compiled reviews from across the internet -- including scraping data from Yelp and other local search sites -- into one destination, along with its own slight number of reviews, and claimed all of those reviews as Google’s own reviews.

Yelp believes that Google’s anticompetitive conduct stifles competition by driving traffic and revenue away from other providers, precluding rivals from achieving scale, and increases rivals’ costs to gain market share for itself.