Once-market-dominant Yelp is taking Google to court for alleged antitrust violations, claiming that the search giant prioritized its own review platform in business search results, in an effort to “stifle competition and keep consumers within its own walled garden.”
Yelp, which has taken steps to increase user trust and business transparency on its site in recent years, said the platform was prioritizing Google products and services over organic search results, in the suit filed in the Northern District of California federal court on Wednesday, adding that Google’s services are often worse for consumers than Yelp’s.
“Google manipulates its results to promote its own local search offerings above those of its rivals, regardless of the comparative poorer quality of its own properties,” a post on Yelp’s website about the suit reads.
The suit comes three weeks after a federal judge handed down a ruling that Google was indeed a monopoly in the search engine space, citing the platform’s payoffs to other tech giants to guarantee itself the default engine on a vast majority of devices.
That antitrust suit, launched by the Department of Justice last year, is one of the largest antitrust cases in recent history, and part of a massive push against anticompetitive and monopolistic business practices by the Biden administration.
Legal experts saw the precedent set in that case as a momentum-builder for other antitrust cases against the search engine and its practices.
Google — which has also sought to keep users from clicking on search results by launching AI-powered summaries that have been accused of plagiarizing content — prioritizes its own map, review and stock systems over natural search results.
Yelp is seeking a restructured approach to search rankings, allowing competition in spaces which Google operates competitors, along with financial damages.