According to the complaint, Google allegedly stole information from Yelp, passing the data as its own.
Local search company Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of using its search engine monopoly to thwart competitors.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Aug. 28. The complaint was brought to “safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages, and prevent Google LLC from engaging in various anticompetitive practices designed to monopolize the markets for local search services and local search advertising,” according to the lawsuit.
Yelp focuses on public reviews of local neighborhood businesses, with the company making money by selling local search advertising. The lawsuit accuses Google of abusing its “monopoly power in general search” to divert traffic away from competitors to its own local search product.
Companies such as Yelp are known as specialized vertical providers (SVPs), as they respond to user queries on a specific subject matter through proprietary, structured data unavailable elsewhere. Other SVPs include Glassdoor for jobs and employers, Expedia for travel, and Zillow for real estate and apartment rentals.
The lawsuit argues that on a level playing field, SVPs such as Yelp threaten Google given the ability of these platforms to siphon traffic and ad revenues away from the tech giant.
At one time, Google sought to acquire Yelp, an offering that was rejected. Google then began a “years-long mission” to restrict Yelp’s ability to reach customers through Google search, Yelp alleges.
“Google has engaged in numerous anti-competitive practices, including stealing information from Yelp’s website and passing it off as Google’s own; preferencing Google’s own local search results over Yelp’s; implementing a ‘OneBox’ feature to prioritize Google’s own inferior local search services at the top of the search results page; and even going so far as to tweak its algorithm and steer customers away from Yelp,” the lawsuit reads.
Google’s actions to prioritize its local search products over competitors allegedly prevent other businesses from achieving scale and reaching more consumers.
