Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman accused Google of fixing the search results game on Wednesday, saying he doesn’t know if his user review website would have made it if Google gave their products “preferential treatment” like they do today.
Stoppelman hasn’t yet testified at the Senate’s antitrust hearing on Google, but he’s already posted his remarks and accompanying presentation online (embedded below).
Yelp officials “believe Google has acted anti-competitively in at least two key ways: by misusing Yelp review content in their competing Places product and by favoring their own competing Places product in search results,” Stoppelman wrote on the company’s blog.
“Google is no longer in the business of sending people to the best sources of information on the web,” he said in his prepared testimony. “It now hopes to be a destination site itself for one vertical market after another, including news, shopping, travel, and now, local business reviews. It would be one thing if these efforts were conducted on a level playing field, but the reality is they are not.”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned Yelp by name in his written testimony before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee, saying there were “no barriers” for consumers who wanted to navigate to websites like Yelp.
Schmidt said most complaints about Google “come from websites that don’t like where their sites rank on Google’s search results page or argue that in providing better answers like maps, shopping, or local results, we are hurting individual sites.”
The Google CEO asked Senators to keep two things in mind when they hear complaints: that Google is built for users and not websites, and that the Internet is fundamentally open.
