Yelp is totally hypocritical
I willing to listen to criticism of Google, except from Yelp. Yelp plays dirty in its earlier days by blackmailing merchants to buy into their sponsorship and hide community critical reviews of their paying sponsors. If Yelp is as heavy weight as Google, they would be behaving much worse than Google.
In defense of Google, they have not done anything that is outrageously unethical. In fact, one of the most important reasons that Google was able to beat Yahoo, Microsoft, and many other search engines in the early days of Internet was precisely Google was trustworthy in the search results. Most other major search engines put their advertisers links in the first few pages of search outcome, while Google carefully delineated what the user was looking for and what the advertisements were. The user rarely clicked into a site under a false pretense. This made both the users and advertisers happy.
Google has grown so big because it is good. Unlike operating systems which users can't easily switch from one to another, search engines have no hook on users. If they don't like Google, they can simply change the URL to another with no legacy baggage. There is no easier way to jump out of Google's ship. You can't punish a winner just because the losers are not good enough. It is unfair either to complain about the winner for being self interest. After all, in a competition, there is no rule that the winner has to help out competitors. The only time when the government should get involved in a free market is when the consumer's interest is hurt by a monopoly. I see no sign that it is the case with Google.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
