>> "Wu co-authored the study with Michael Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and data scientists at the local reviews site Yelp, which has been one of Google's primary opponents in the global antitrust fight. Wu was paid by Yelp for his work on the paper."
"A 2011 Harvard study by Michael Luca found that there was no significant statistical correlation between being a Yelp advertiser and having more favorable reviews."
Skewed reviews or not, I tend to avoid Yelp search results. They intentionally degrade the web experience in favor of repeatedly promoting their native application; the opposite of useful content when searching for a restaurant etc.
It is an unfortunate fact of academic life that you need a grant to complete your study. Take a look at studies that come out of HBS or Stanford GSB; more often than not they are sponsored by big banks and investment firms.
I do feel as uncomfortable about this as you do. This sort of sponsoring ruins academic objectivity.
There is no need for grants in top b-schools. Whereas other academic departments pay faculty 9-months out of the year, even third-tier b-schools will pay for 2/9 or 3/9 of your salary in the summer if you publish just about anything.
Larger studies? No problem, the dean has you covered. The brilliance of b-schools is that they can mint $ with certificates and exec Ed, all of which is available to them at low overhead (namely the university collects a lesser cut).
It's preposterous to believe that faculty at the very top need to whore themselves out to industry for funding. What they will do to get their hands on data, however, is unspeakable. Yelp, Dropbox, eBay, etc. are merely providing data to the researchers, and more often than not, they have a say on what gets published. The truth always does eventually come out (e.g. negative company information) but it does so behind conference/seminar doors, not in print.
I'm just beginning my reading of this 'paper' but so far I'm not convinced. From what I can tell, they compared Google's pages with and without Yelp reviews, but Yelp won't give this data to Google. Therefore it's complete bullshit, they're comparing a hypothetical product that cannot exist and arguing that Google is being anticompetitive because users prefer this nonexistant product.
Yeah it seems you're right. The article makes it sound like they are comparing a page with Google's "knowledge graph" results at the top, with one where those are removed and the normal search results are at the top.
But what they are actually comparing it with is a made up results page where they replace Google's knowledge graph reviews which come from Google+, with reviews that come from Yelp. Obviously there are far more Yelp reviews than Google+, so people thing that page is better. But that totally ignores the fact that Yelp reviews are not trustworthy.
Yelp has been accused (with some convincing evidence) of running a protection racket. Phoning companies and offering to make their negative reviews less visible. When the company refuses, their positive reviews are 'flagged for review' or similar, affecting their score.
I have no evidence to support this, but it has been corroborated by people you can easily search for.
I discovered the great case of Botto Italian Bistro when it floated to the top of HN a few months ago for asking its customers to write them 1-star reviews on Yelp after Yelp tried to scam them.
At first I thought that when you said, "this data" you were referring to the study's dataset, but now I realize you mean the live data feed Google would need to make the search results look like the product the users in the study seemed to prefer.
Whether Yelp supplies data to Google is irrelevant. The point of the study was to show that users don't like ads masquerading as organic content and neither do competitors. Therefore if Google is the only winner then their motives are anticompetitive.
The logic is sound. Yelp doesn't need to be complicit in it to disagree with it. Nor frankly should they. It's a dumb feature that actually makes Google less functional.
They didn't remove ads. They removed knowledge graph data. Knowledge graph results aren't paid placement they are a collection of facts that Google has discovered through various sources, much like organic search results.
In this case the facts come from Google+ reviews. Google is just as likely to display Yelp reviews if they were able to collect that data. Yelp however doesn't supply it.
> Google is just as likely to display Yelp reviews if they were able to collect that data. Yelp however doesn't supply it.
I'm pretty sure arguing for this kind of solution would be silly if Google were to, say, also require payment. I wonder, is this really so much different without money changing hands? Why is it Yelp's responsibility to provide Google access to their data in order to get a fair playground in "Search"? The same Google, by the way, which offers a directly competing product "Locale"?
It's a pay-to-play model, just without any money in order to seem innocent. Except everyone knows that data is Google's real currency, so that whole innocence goes out the window and the true cost to pay-to-play is revealed. I think Yelp is exactly right to want to protect their data from Google, and I think they're right in fighting this.
> Why is it Yelp's responsibility to provide Google access to their data in order to get a fair playground in "Search"?
You're asking why it's a site's responsibility to ensure a search engine can index them in order for them to appear in the index. Your question presupposes that no information is required for Yelp to be featured in results. This is fallacious.
> I think Yelp is exactly right to want to protect their data from Google, and I think they're right in fighting this.
That is not what Yelp is fighting for. They want Google to link to their site, but without scraping any data. Such a thing would obviously have to be a manual edit to the ranking database and I can't believe you'd want that.
You're pulling a huge bait-and-switch in your argument here. No one was discussing indexing for "organic" search results. The original comment:
> In this case the facts [for "knowledge graph"] come from Google+ reviews. Google is just as likely to display Yelp reviews if they were able to collect that data. Yelp however doesn't supply it.
This statement is implying that Yelp should be supplying their data to Google in order to be included in the "knowledge graph". That is what I was responding to. And I think Yelp has a pretty compelling case of refusing to open their data to a competitor.
That is not my original comment. Yelp is currently refusing to open their data, but they cannot both do that and demand Google artificially rank them highly in the results.
Apologies. I corrected my comment to reflect this.
> Yelp is currently refusing to open their data, but they cannot both do that and demand Google artificially rank them highly in the results.
I wasn't under the impression that anyone was debating the "organic" search results at all. I was under the impression that this is regarding the sections Google places above the search results which emphasize its own services unrelated to Search over competitors.
This is getting overly complex, so I'll try and summarise.
This paper uses a disingenuous comparison of the Maps Search section of Google's results with one augmented with Yelp feedback. What is shown is that more users will click the links when they have higher reviews.
However. Yelp flat out refuses to provide this information, and in fact if they were to be added to the results they couldn't feature in this section.
This 'logic' is then used to say it is illegal for Google to provide any more specific but still search based media on their page unless every single third party provider of similar search services consents to being included on the listings.
>“Google appears to be strategically deploying universal search in a way that degrades the product so as to slow and exclude challengers to its dominant search paradigm, ” the paper concludes
So Google is hurting competitors by degrading its own product (if you believe this study commissioned by a competitor). This sounds to me like a situation that is perfectly self limiting and self correcting.
It's interesting that for years people have been hammering them about being a monopoly and looking for angles to try and get the DOJ to go after them.
While it's clear they're giving preference to their own content, it's a shaky argument since I know I can go to multiple other search engines and compare results.
You have a harder time convincing me as well since this is not like the Walmart in BFE North Dakota where people have to drive an hour before they can find another competitor - it's the internet. A few clicks here, a few clicks there, and you have plenty of other options.
Sorry, but you can't call it a monopoly if people are just too lazy to find another search engine to compare results with.
People really need to understand that antitrust and monopoly do not mean the same thing. The existence of a competitor does not automatically make antitrust behavior OK. The main focus of antitrust law is how an action effects consumers; effects on competitors are only interesting in the sense of effecting consumers. (With the understanding that more competition generally means more choices for consumers, which is held as a Good Thing™.) I would suggest giving the Wikipedia antitrust article a good read, as a start:
There are some areas (e.g. weather), where Google's own content is a lot more useful (because of its simplicity) to me than third-party sites. On others (e.g. shopping in DE) not so much.
I'm split on this issue. To me, it should be Google's job to both provide a list of viable candidates from its advertising segment and that which is found on the wider web. I just wish that Google would return to the way it use to mark the difference between the two. Anymore, it seems they want to confuse users between their advert search results and the actual web results. But it's clear that this is an inherent conflict of interest that can't be solved, at least in my opinion, by using a sledgehammer approach of antitrust laws.
Any google code that explicitly mentions another google product in their search engine rankings algorithm would be evidence of anti-competitive behaviour. Absent that I don't see how you could make an outside observation stating that google engages in anti-competitive practices. There may be a lot of smoke but that's the only thing that I would call a fire. So if they want to prove this google will have to open up their search engine code base, which I really don't see happening.
This happens today though. Google search for "bars" shows a custom component at the top which links through to what is a mini Yelp site complete with reviews. It isn't aggregating reviews from the web they are specifically "Google Reviews" from Google+ users.
This sort of behaviour is very similar to what got Microsoft in so much trouble. Going from one market "search engine" to another "reviews". Normally adding features like this would be fine but because Google is so powerful as to make/break web businesses it can easily be seen as anticompetitive.
>A previously undisclosed report by staffers at the Federal Trade Commission reveals new details about how Google Inc. manipulated search results to favor its own services over rivals’, even when they weren’t most relevant for users.
>In a lengthy investigation, staffers in the FTC’s bureau of competition found evidence that Google boosted its own services for shopping, travel and local businesses by altering its ranking criteria and “scraping” content from other sites. It also deliberately demoted rivals.
>For example, the FTC staff noted that Google presented results from its flight-search tool ahead of other travel sites, even though Google offered fewer flight options. Google’s shopping results were ranked above rival comparison-shopping engines, even though users didn’t click on them at the same rate, the staff found. Many of the ways Google boosted its own results have not been previously disclosed.
>One way Google favored its own results was to change its ranking criteria. Google typically ranks sites based on measures like the number of links that point to a site, or how often users click on the site in search results.
>But Marissa Mayer, who was then a Google vice president, said Google didn’t use click-through rates to determine the ranking for its own specialized-search sites, because they would rank too low, according to the staff report
>Instead, Google would “automatically boost” its own sites for certain specialized searches that otherwise would favor rivals, the FTC found. If a comparison-shopping site was supposed to rank highly, Google Product Search was placed above it. When Yelp was deemed relevant to a user’s search query, Google Local would pop up on top of the results page, the staff wrote.
>Other regulators have found similar practices. European antitrust authorities in 2013 said Google had a different, “specialized” search algorithm for ranking its own content.
>To bolster its own listings, Google sometimes copied, or “scraped,” information from rival sites. According to the FTC report, Google copied Amazon’s rankings of how well products were selling, then used that information to rank its results for product searches. Amazon declined to comment.
>While Google promoted its own results, it sometimes demoted rivals, the FTC staff found. For example, Google compiled a list of comparison-shopping sites and “demoted them from the top 10 web results,” staff wrote. According to the report, Google users in tests didn’t like the changes; only after Google tweaked its search algorithm at least four times, and changed the ranking criteria, did the new results get “slightly positive” feedback, the staff said.
>Google’s efforts paid off, the FTC found. It said Google’s maneuvers reduced Web traffic to rivals, and increased traffic to Google sites.
"The new study, which was presented at the Antitrust Enforcement Symposium in Oxford, U.K., over the weekend, says the content Google displays at the top of many search results pages is inferior to material on competing websites. For this reason, the paper asserts, the practice has the effect of harming consumers. "
Great, now there's scientific basis behind what I've been observing for the last 5 years or so. Google search results are actually really, really bad. There are ads everywhere and everything is designed to make you click them. I'm not at all surprised by the findings. And it doesn't matter that Yelp paid them, after all it's Google who is unfairly competing against Yelp here and hurting their business.
That's a fun fact.