I'm in no way defending anything google here, I was just stating that Yelp if as bad is not worse than google (as they are more desperate for revenue). And I have no incentive to lie, the anecdote was something that happened to a close friend of mine and know what kind of distress it caused. I have no idea if their corporate strategy is to " extort ", but from noticing other incidents they're not too far off. Their actions like the actions of other big corps are absolutely abusive.
I will have to do some searching to grab a screen cap, but I can tell you that Yelp explicitly advertised a paid "feature" to small businesses like mine to hide competitors from top search results in exchange for a fee. I don't know that empirical proof of systemic abusive behavior and antitrust violations would necessarily be useful here. They are clearly employing tactics that actively damage open competition and informed consumer choice, and even anecdotal evidence of that is justification for regulatory movement to stop it.
Yelp can easily expose businesses to people who are more likely to give bad reviews too.
I mean they collect this data on every profile - some reviewers have a TON of 1 star reviews. Hide the restaurants that pay and increase exposure of those that don’t to these reviewers to get them to give poor ratings.
Obviously there is no way to prove this, but it would be a great way to get people to pay while still maintaining plausible deniability. After all, the one star reviewers still have to go to the establishment and have their bad experience.
Out of principle I trust Google more than Yelp as they're less incentivized to extort small businesses. Also companies that cripple their mobile site (while having a functional desktop site) to force an app download deserve everything bad that happens to them
