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Online Travel

Google Feasts on its Own Restaurant Reviews, Angering TripAdvisor and Yelp

Dennis Schaal photo
Dennis Schaal

Photo Credit: Google's restaurant review results give critiques from its Zagat unit prime placement. Zagat

Skift Take

If Google is using the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine how it arranges restaurant information in search results then in a lot of ways it believes professional reviews, and especially those from its Zagat franchise, trump user reviews. But when it gets down to displaying the text of diners' reviews, Google unfairly believes that its own consumer reviews are the fairest of them all.

Google is feeding scraps to admirers of TripAdvisor, OpenTable and Yelp's restaurant reviews on mobile as the search-engine behemoth emphasizes professional reviews from its own Zagat unit and Google user reviews over other popular review sites. As recode pointed out, the CEOs of TripAdvisor, Steve Kaufer, and Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman, aren't taking kindly to getting the Google treatment in that consumers might get finger cramps when scrolling down Google results on their phones trying to find dining reviews from the aggrieved user-generated content duo.

If Google would just let users search the web instead of foisting their content

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