Google Rival Yelp Claims Search Giant Broke Promise Made to Regulators (wsj.com) 61
Online-reviews firm Yelp alleged that Google is breaking a promise it made as part of a 2012 regulatory settlement to not scrape content from certain third-party sites including Yelp, escalating its yearslong battle against the search giant. Yelp said in a letter late Sunday to Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen that Google is using Yelp photos for local-business listings in its search results, despite Yelp's formal request that Google not pull such content from its site. From a report: As part of a December 2012 settlement to end an FTC investigation into Google, the tech giant agreed to not use content, including photos and user reviews, from third-party sites that opted out of such scraping. Google's commitment lasts through 2017 and applies to a variety of its products, including its local-business listings. "This is a flagrant violation of Google's promises to the FTC, and the FTC should reopen the Google case immediately," said Luther Lowe, Yelp's public-policy chief. Yelp has emerged as a leading critic of Google because the site believes the search giant unfairly uses its influence to stifle competitors.
Google rival? (Score:3)
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How about a robots.txt file? (Score:2)
Hu? I see nothing in the yelp.com/robots.txt file which prevent google from accessing the site. Did I miss something someware?
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But where is the request not to do it? I don't see it in their robots.txt file (That is where you put that kind of requests).
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In a court document somewhere.
Not to mention robots.txt doesn't do the right job. Yelp doesn't want Google to stop indexing their site, they just want Google to stop using their content for their quickboxes and other places where a (potential) user might get the information straight from the search page without clicking through.
I don't know how legitimate Yelp's complaint is in this case, but I'm sure if they could get what they wanted with a simple robots.txt tweak, they would have already done so.
Re: How about a robots.txt file? (Score:1)
Dude. Meatspace!
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Hey, language please.
But they point is: Why did they not put their formal request where you put that kind of things: robots.txt
Re: How about a robots.txt file? (Score:4, Informative)
According to the rfc (http://www.robotstxt.org/norobots-rfc.txt) That would be something like
Disallow: *.png
Disallow: *.jpg
which google does support last time i checked. (Which is more then a year ago, but still).
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The actual complaint seems to be that Google are using images from Yelp in search results and from there as links back to Yelp.com
For example, A search for "brooklyn zoo williamsburg" shows the interior of the building as one of the photos. If you click that image, Google says it came from Yelp and if you click the image it takes you to the Yelp page for Brooklyn Zoo.
It seems Yelp is concerned that it's not adding value beyond what the Google search already delivered and so folk won't click the image.
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If I had mod points, I would mod this informative.
If they simply used a robots.txt, and Google still scraped their site, they would be able to sue for hacking. They would also be able to use the DMCA to have the results removed.
Whether what Google did was ethical or not, it could have been prevented with 2 to 4 lines of code.
As for court orders, if their developers were competent enough to use a robots.txt file, they could have saved a ton of time/money/and all of our time reading about it on Slashdot.
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I think they want Google to index their pages, to drive traffic from Google users to Yelp. But they don't want Google to be showing Yelp images to represent businesses on Google properties. I don't think robots.txt provides enough subtlety for this distinction.
Yelp got Yelped (Score:4, Funny)
Don't be evil (Score:3)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.c... [bleepingcomputer.com]
1/2 of their revenue coming from the US Government & military, (aka, selling YOU the user out)
http://politicalblindspot.com/... [politicalblindspot.com]
Google is just a company, like most corporations today. There is little concern about people, it's all about profit. If people get hurt, so what as long as investors get a return.
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Google is just a company, like most corporations today. There is little concern about people, it's all about profit. If people get hurt, so what as long as investors get a return.
Remember, capitalism is all about what the *market will bear*. And the "market" has no respect for the individual, never did. It is a collective, like communism, and Google et al is the politburo
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Despite your lame trolling there, yes, that is capitalism. Government is just another player, more of a servant to our corporate friends than master. That's why they get bailed out. Don't want that campaign funding to dry up now, do we?
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As far as "do the right thing", who defines "right"? "Right" in a moral, political or financial sense? It's still just smokescreen to try and mask they're just spy's selling your personal information.
Non paywalled link (Score:4, Informative)
Same topic from a non-paywalled site [thehill.com]. For the four /. readers that read the summary and the article.
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I am one of the 4 /. readers. ;)
Does Yelp own the copyright to those photos? (Score:2)
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No, this is Google copying the photos. If you click on the photos in question, Google says the image came from Yelp and if you click the image for more information, it takes you off the Google domain and back to yelp.com
Here's an example [google.com]. Click the image showing the interior with purple mats.
Yelp's days are numbered (Score:2)
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If that's true, it's even funnier that they are scrapping the fact they produce the yellow pages in the uk, becoming a 'online only' company.
I presume this is the same company that published the yellow pages....
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Who trusts Yelp now? It's not like their business model is a secret. Would you trust a company that openly extorts business' and is known to hide bad reviews for cash?
That said it's exactly the same business model as 'better business bureaus' so who knows. People are stupid.
simple (Score:2)
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Only off of my boot heel.
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simple solution - can we just scrape Yelp?
I think they are doing that themselves. We were on vacation and were looking restaurants recently. The ratings on Yelp are almost totally useless anymore. Any one star review seems to be excluded (under "not recommended reviews"), and two restaurants (say a fast food burger joint and a high-end dinner place) will be rated the same. That's just useless.
Zagat was more useful, but since Google purchased them, they've languished. Perhaps after the legal agreement with Yelp is over this year, Google will put sig
In other words (Score:3)
Website known for behaving unethically complains (legitimately) about other website behaving unethically.
How to de-google the planet? (Score:1)
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Eventually a smartphone/device/whatever will come along and whack Google over the head. This type of change none of us see coming until it happens.
You mean like the iPhone did in 2007?
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She sounds hot. I wonder if she likes bareback.
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The TL;DR version: you cannot wait for the current evil corporate overlord to be replaced by another (probably worse) evil corporate overlord.
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How this will potentially happen, with contributions from the participants:
Samsung: The phone itself, the operating system, position as the top smartphone manufacturer
Microsoft: Office and related software, connections to enterprise industry, the existing vendor lock-ins they have created
Amazon: Superior logistics, banning competing devices or making them cost more, especially if they manage to get into a near-monopoly in the future
This has the potential for killing Google and replacing it with something th
All your content are belong to us (Score:2)
No real surprise from google, that they think "What's mine is mine, and what's yours we can talk about"
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It sucks your music got 'stolen', however, if you publish something on the internet, and this is true for anything published on the internet (as for anyone available without a restriction to authenticate), consider, by default, it will be handled as if in the public domain. Everyone can do whatever they like to do with it. This includes Google. This is because the internet is an open medium and if you want restrictions, you have to implement those yourself. You can't expect someone else to do that for you (
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Nice rant. Too bad its completely wrong. Just because we treat everything on the internet as public domain doesn't mean it IS public domain. The only reason you and I don't get sued for copyright infringement is because we're too small to matter -- even the recording industry has kind of backed off suing thousands of John Doe's at a time because its too futile to warrant the bad PR and are focusing more on things like torrent sites (which is also pretty futile but at least they can name some defendants a
A tough choice (Score:3)
Who do I root for? This is like having to choose whether to live next door to a child molester or a telemarketer.
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So you're OK with Yelp suppressing good reviews and refusing to remove libelous ones unless they're paid? That's just "an employee doing their job"?
How do you... (Score:1)
...stop a giant evil snowball from rolling over your village?
I'll throw in hot sauce as a starter.
Yet the Yelp monopoly protects the Google monopoly (Score:1)
I would have more respect for Yelp's complaint if they just blocked Google and other monopolies altogether. They however exclusively only allow Google and other monopolies to crawl their site while blocking everyone else. Talk about hypocrisy.
Look at their robots.txt file. They only allow monopolies to crawl their site and for everyone else there is this big FU:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
I and others have dealt with them directly on this to get this changed for text but no luck.
I have come back to see my score. (Score:2)
I wish the best for the human species. Yet, I have no faith.
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