Yelp has filed a federal suit against Google, citing monopolistic practices in local search.
The review site would like to see Google forced to prioritize the best results for users, even if those don’t come from Google itself.
Yelp hopes that its efforts will see the court level the playing field for companies competing with Google.
Update: August 29, 2024 (07:43 PM ET): Yelp is unsurprisingly not super happy with Google’s response to its lawsuit. We just got a counter-response from Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur, who attempts to highlight how the company’s case differs from earlier actions pursued against Google:
Google’s statement is misleading. Yelp’s claims have never been pursued in court, let alone thrown out. In 2023, in the government’s antitrust case, Judge Mehta ruled there was a lack of evidence that Google’s degradation of specialized vertical providers, like Yelp, had an anticompetitive effect in general search — but Yelp is not a competitor in the general search market. Yelp’s complaint explains how Google harms competition in the local search and local search advertising markets, including through self-preferencing its own lower-quality offerings and exclusive billion-dollar deals with web browsers and device makers.
