

Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More - andrewpbrett
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/17/google-acquire-buy-yelp/

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ShabbyDoo
Doesn't Yelp offer astro-turfing for $$$? I hope that this practice doesn't
fall under the umbrella of "don't be evil."

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seldo
The accusation much more frequently levelled is that they extort business to
pay to have negative reviews hidden:

[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-
business-...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-of-
extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635)

It's not lying -- the good reviews that remain come from real people -- but
it's certainly misleading.

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efsavage
I can vouch that negative reviews can be hidden, my friend wrote one and he
sees "23 reviews" including his own, when he is logged in. Everyone else sees
"22 reviews" and his is omitted.

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liquidcool
I really like Yelp and I think it's a great service, but I don't contribute
because of the complete lack of data portability. Even their RSS feeds are
heavily truncated. I'd contribute significantly if this changed. For instance,
automatically posting my Yelp reviews to my blog would be a big incentive.

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brianobush
well, they have almost 22B dollars sitting in cash. from an investor's point
of view, that is wasteful. Easy way to turn that cash into growing revenue
streams is to purchase profitable companies. Though 500 mil is a bit steep to
pay for yelp IMHO.

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sachinag
Yelp is sitting on a massive store of local business data. That's useful for
search quality. Yelp is in the first three results for the majority of
businesses in their database. That's useful for search monetization. They also
have a direct sales force calling on local SMEs. That's useful for Google
Apps. I could go on.

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nudist
More valuable than all that is the fact that Yelp is the de-facto real-world
review site. Its brand is powerful, about as powerful as YouTube's was when
Google bought them.

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josefresco
I have to disagree. Unless you live in a city, your average person has never
heard of Yelp. When Google bought YouTube it was a different story.

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wmeredith
I concur. I live in kansas City and work on computers all day. I've _heard_ of
Yelp, but I've never used them or seen them pop up in search results for local
business.

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willwagner
This seems like a good marriage to me (or is it an adoption?). More and more
on google, I see adsense results that are local in nature, and with more focus
on android, this is a perfect addition to get more ad real estate that is
location based.

I use a lot of iphone apps, but more often than not, when I have my wallet
out, I use the Yelp app to purchase food or drink. As a user, I'd be much more
reluctant to utilize an admob ad on an unrelated iphone app or game as opposed
to clicking on an ad when I'm trying to find a good thai restaurant somewhere
in the midwest.

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jsm386
This would actually perfectly compliment the new PlaceRank effort in which
Google is sending out all of those QR stickers - Think foursquare for check in
+ Yelp userbase/content + locally targeted adwords, and throw in AdMob.

About the stickers: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google-
foursqu...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google-foursquare-
loopt/)

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malbiniak
you'll never, ever, ever hear me say this ever again: _i thought scoble made
some interesting points_ (when he talked about facebook acquiring yelp).
[http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-
missed...](http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-missed-
buying-twitter-and-now-should-eat-yelp/)

but what does google have to gain? extend google maps/local? aren't they
already scraping reviews and ratings? screw the "don't be evil," what's in it
for them...especially at $500M?

and as a random peanut gallery jab, it kills me how "past the term sheet
stage" indicates an 80% probability. isn't anything past .01% "past the term
sheet stage?"

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jgilliam
Yelp has a lot of relationships with local businesses, something they are
trying to grow with AdWords.

They also want the dataset. The current reviews google is crawling are lousy
compared to Yelp's.

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aresant
To max out profit Google may as well own the top 10 listings they display
under major search terms (Knol) and long-tail local search (Yelp).

That should cover 50% of profitable searches yes?

Toddling monopoly?

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leej
i wonder if msft allows google to grab yelp too.

