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Showing posts from June, 2015

Google+ Bashing: Yelp Has It Right (But It's Google's World)

Today's New York Times has a very provocative article about a study conducted by Tim Wu of Columbia University on local search results. Essentially, Wu presented people with local search results in two ways -  With the Google+ "snack pack" of local search results Without these results, showing the older "traditional" search results, excluding the "snack pack" of local. According to Wu and the study (financed by Google competitor Yelp ), consumers strongly preferred the second set of results. Essentially the study argues that Google is systematically giving preferences to Google+ local results OVER the "better" Google organic results. Yelp also financed an infomercial website called Focus on the User and a YouTube video explaining it.  All of this argues that Google is using its monopoly search power to give preference to its own local system, Google+ Local (now renamed Google My Business ) over Yelp's competitive local system