I've seen this when searching for restaurants, and I spotted it right away. It's a classic dark pattern and I'm surprised that more restaurants aren't suing them over this.
Google search results have become dangerous (for lack of a better word) and really hard to use when searching for some things lately. I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me. I understand they want to squeeze every possible dollar out of every search, but I no longer trust them for certain searches.
I'm not even talking about the results, this is just what's on the actual Google search results page. There's just way too many ads and other tricks like this happening.
"I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me."
I've noticed it only a handful of times, but phone numbers for listings, can't be trusted either anymore [1]
GrubHub also does it: there has been more than one occasion where I've searched a restaurant in a new town while traveling for work, called the phone number to inquire about a menu item thinking I was dialing the restaurant but I had instead dialed a GrubHub or Goggle contact center.
At first I didn't realize what was going on, but quickly put it together after ordering from a restaurant that appeared in Google, using the "order form" and getting a phone call from a different voice telling me the item I ordered hadn't been sold by the restaurant in weeks due to sourcing issues.
"I just spoke with Mark, he said you do sell it"
"We don't have anyone named Mark working here"
I go check the listing again, check the phone number, and ask the person on the other end of the line what the restaurant business telephone number is: sure enough it's a completely different number.
Not sure how widespread this is or how to tell which restaurant phone numbers on these platforms take me to someone actually at the establishment, but....well...shit like this.
From that endgadget article: Users wouldn't have ordered food "without our platform," company spokesperson Brendan Lewis said.
Ah yes, if it wasn't for GrubHub, we would all starve!
I've never seen the middle-man parasite's lie exposed this clearly. People have been ordering direct from restaurants for ages, but now that Yelp/Grubhub managed to muscle their way between restaurants and customers, they take credit for this entire business existing, to justify their sleazy practices.
this is one area where the FTC should be stepping in, It should be seen as blatant fraud for a business to represent themselves as another business to the point where users are confused who they are actually calling.
It always amazes me that the government is never concerned with things is SHOULD BE, instead is very concerned with things that should be none of its business.
I just tried making reservations for an anniversary dinner, so I Google "Obstinate Daughter" and they put up a little widget for Resy and lo and behold there are no good reservations times available despite it being zero-dark-thirty on the first day one could even make reservations for my targeted date.
Now I'm a bit skeptical that the city collectively got up at the ass-crack of dawn to make a dinner reservation on a random weeknight, so I go visit the restaurant website and they have a wide open calendar. Had I not scrutinized the Google offerings the restaurant would have lost out on my business.
IANAL but that whole offering on the part of Google just seems morally wrong if not some form of fraudulent.
So I wonder what's the end game of a pattern like this? Is it a shakedown type of situation where if a restaurant doesn't pay up to enable some reservations "integration" they will be shown as fully booked by default?
As far as I see that restaurant just does in fact use Resy and it looks to me like Google just shows the same results the Resy site does. What they do do is just not show you times that are outside a window around the selected time (and they preselect one) so maybe that's the issue?
I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.
The irony is that these techniques are against their own TOS for Adsense/Adwords, but I guess it's more of a "do as I say, not as I do" sort of situation.
That reminds me of an old tweet from someone to Matt Cutts (at least I think it was Cutts). MC had tweeted a reply to someone about how they don't allow scrapers and sites that just reuse content from other sites. Someone else replied to him with a screenshot of Google's search results page that had scraped and reused something from somewhere and said "I think I found one of those sites for you". (Hoping I remember that at least somewhat close to how it happened! It's a somewhat faded memory from several years ago)
A restaurant tried to call me about an order, but coming from a toll free number I ignored it. I asked them why they didn't have a local number. They could only call me back via the door dash number as my number wasn't provided to the restaurant. It was weird.
Around here the local restaurant POS vendor exposed their interface online and made and app for pickups. I'll use that directly if I'm ordering from a place that uses it. Thats a little fraught too, because the staff has to learn to use that too (staff has to have some training on turing online ordering on or off..which they sometimes have forgotten to do)
Ycombinator is enabling this kind of behavior, either historically or currently.
I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. And barring active influence, they should outwardly denounce companies that choose to engage in these kinds of scams.
(I have a private plugin that does company searches and sees if they are a YC company. You'd be really surprised just how many negative articles are YC founded companies.)
When I was interning for a consultancy one of my assignments was to create a system that could be placed in restaurants to mitm printer jobs so that our low fee delivery service could scrape phone numbers and emails from third party delivery receipts and send coupons to get customers to switch to our service. Doordash probably figured out this sort of stuff was happening so took all the identifying info out of their service?
Lots of restaurants around here use Toast and I'll pretty much always use that if it's available.
I get a nice consistent interface, it remembers my name/payment across the different restaurants that use it, and as far as I've seen they're not a raw deal for the restaurant. Square I think is pretty similar? Though I just don't personally see as many places using it for online ordering.
This Google feature unfortunately seems to favor the high-commission major apps in its listings, though the "native" one where Google itself shows an ordering interface seems to be a no-commission DoorDash thing, at least for the restaurants I've seen? Which still has "extra-middleman" problems but at least isn't so bad financially.
Yep. I noticed this when they started doing it in maps. I always wonder what their commission is, which is in turn part of the commission for Grubhub or any other food delivery service.
You have to make a real effort to avoid their crap hurdles just to make it to the damn restaurant’s own website.
I could be wrong here, but, I think the lawsuit is totally misdirected. Restaurants should be upset with the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) instead.
The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent. (Or, perhaps worse, offering orders without restaurant consent?)
Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2]
I don't think Google even takes a cut!
I worked on an integration to a similar API, "Reserve with Google" [3]. With that one, at least, it can be enabled/disabled at the restaurant level. I assume that "Order with Google" is similar.
Google takes a cut when those companies pay for ads on the platform. It's the old switcheroo...
For many years Google had run their search engine as a trusted source for indexed search with advertising subtly placed. Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.
I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges. It's so bad now that the only way I can ensure that I'm not being overcharged for no good reason is to order by phone or directly at restaurants. There is very little value added to so many online businesses now because of twisted Internet schemes like this.
> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.
Slightly off topic, but as an example of this, I did a search for the manufacturer part number of a brushed DC motor the other day. It was just a randomish string of characters like S-5672 or something, and under image results and all the results were completely unrelated pictures of an entirely different brushless motor that I had recently purchased. The seeming effect of this is that Google knew I was looking for a specific product, and chose to show me a competing product instead, despite them not being comparable.
> Google takes a cut when those companies pay for ads on the platform.
> I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges.
That's definitely true, but that's not what's being discussed.
> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.
Do you mean for restaurant results specifically or all Google Search results? Big difference if both.
It's fascinating to me that the search results page on mobile is often three-ish screens of non-website links. Instead, it's ads, answers, images, and other random stuff. These things are either monetized or scraped from someone's website.
> The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent.
The lawsuit seems to focus on the history of how that happened a bit. Namely Google seems to have initially tried to sell this API to restaurants directly. Hence the brazen trademark infringement and restaurant impersonation, it was intended to operate with the authorization of the restaurants directly. Only when that failed did they move on to third party distributors that didn't have any right to the trademarks, without changing the now deceptive interface.
> I don't think Google even takes a cut!
The lawsuit is a bit unclear on that (through information and belief) but also cites alternative revenue streams through ads and pushing more people onto its own payment platform.
> Namely Google seems to have initially tried to sell this API to restaurants directly.
...which was a fools errand. It is impossible to expect individual restaurants (_maybe_ aside from large restaurant groups - ie, big chains) to integrate with this API.
To me it seems much more likely that Google pivoted to working directly with delivery operators for practical reasons to make the product functional.
I would also bet that contracts with the delivery operators include a bit about how they will enable this integration and what that means. Perhaps they do not make it explicit enough in the sales cycle (or, didn't in the case of Lime)
It is completely irrelevant if Google takes a cut or not. Google uses the restaurant's brand name to enable one of their delivery partners to undercut the restaurant's own delivery system.
The nature of the partnership between Google and the delivery firm is not directly relevant to the restaurant's loss of revenue. They could be building a future business, they could be compensated in an indirect fashion (ex. those who pay more to AdSense get a preferential treatment) etc.
I honestly don’t know how restaurants even get a say in the matter. Ultimately, as a customer I am placing a to-go order and hiring somebody to go pick it up for me.
DoorDash has made an effort to streamline the process. If to-go orders are an option then you really don’t get a choice in who I send to pick it up.
They get a say because those companies were doing everything they can not to let the customer know about that disconnect. Many customers thought the restaurant had agreed to the service, and were holding the restaurant responsible for mistakes the delivery companies made.
I'm not quite willing to call it fraud yet, but it's in that area.
The problem is that Google makes it look like it's part of the restaurant's own Google Business account but then directs to a 3rd party without the restaurant's explicit consent.
I just wish there was a way to disable that integration. I have to go out of my way to avoid using it and go directly to the restaurant site to place the order.
> Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2]
> I don't think Google even takes a cut!
Yes officer, I did leave the bank door unlocked as a favor to my friend, but I didn't even get any of the stolen money!
It could be more of a strategic play to keep eyeballs on Google properties and further build the advertising profile. Also provides a foothold into entering the ordering/delivery/reservation businesses at a much later date if they so choose.
IIRC Google didn't take a cut on restaurant reservations, at least
I had this happen to me. Went to order something for pickup from maps. I thought it was the restaurant's page but the order went through postmates. When I arrived to pick up my order, the staff seemed to think I was an employee of postmates.
Anyway, when I got home I did some searching and found out the restaurant had a different webpage from what I ordered from. The prices I paid were a little higher than the actual business websites. It seems postmates charged me more, taking a cut while doing nothing to make the food or deliver it. What a parasitic business to inject yourself as a third party like that.
There's been quite a few companies doing some growth hacking, or I guess straight up stealing by putting their url as the url for a restaurant. It's hard to trust anything Google maps tells me since there's no real source of truth.
Zomato is the worst thing I have seen. I stopped using it and moved to Swiggy. To order from zomato, you need their app, you cannot order from their website. On swiggy, you can either order from their website or app.
I like to order stuff of any service from their website. Usually, the play/app store apps are filled with ads, trackers, spyware.
I had much the same problem, ordered from my favorite local Mexican place for delivery, but Doordash apparently had no agreement with the restaurant, despite holding themselves out as the restaurant. Instead, they posted a menu with incorrect items, incorrect prices and just sent someone to stand in line to order from them.
Needless to say, the food was incorrectly ordered, an hour late and cold. To top it all off, they attempted to charge me for the difference in price. Luckily, I put a stop to this via my credit card, and have boycotted Doordash since.
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon amongst the various food delivery companies, despite being obvious fraud.
It's so common you have to assume Google is happy with the way it works. Flowers, locksmiths, tow trucks, etc. all have parasites like that in their industry. Basically anything where you don't need to be there physically is going to have someone trying to game the system to act as a middle man that does nothing.
My mother got scammed by the flowers version by clicking on a Google Ad and not realizing she was dealing with a middleman that was doing nothing more than adding $50 to local prices and calling in orders. And when people that don't realize what's going on feel like they got ripped off, the real business seems to be the one that gets the bad review.
The easiest thing to do is to assume Google is nothing but spam and scams. I'm convinced there's a market opportunity for local web indexes similar to what Yahoo used to be because there's nothing to use for discovery that isn't trying to scam you.
Google is the closest group to the consumer here, but the actual bad actors are DoorDash / GrubHub / etc. The delivery companies add the restaurants to their sites without permission, then Google indexes those pages and provides smart widgets for them.
Take away the delivery companies’ bad practices, you take away the Google experience the restaurants don’t like.
If DoorDash and GrubHub are the bad actors, and what they're doing is well enough known that people on HN know about it, why can't Google adjust their algorithms accordingly? Hell, with two big companies like that they could just sanction them directly for subverting the algorithms.
I think it makes the most sense to hold Google responsible here since they are in the best position to solve the problem and they're not showing any inclination to do so.
Funny how there is pushback on the YCombinator forum to an attempt to hold accountable a YCombinator company that actually has a direct hand in doing this to restaurants.
How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't? The vast majority of these postings are fine/legitimate/consented. Why does it have to be Google that spends time and energy going after the bad actors, and if they don't, they become one?
In other words, I really don't see how Google is in the best position to figure out which restaurants have been posted without the restaurant's consent. I think that would be the companies putting up the original post.
Same reason Google engineers don't delist sites like gitmemory and don't stop writing bots that automatically can people's accounts without recourse. They just don't care enough to leverage their vast power.
Not excusing anyone but, AFAICT, DoorDash and GrubHub are extremely popular. Google is just giving consumers what they want. I have friends who eat > 50% of their meals via DoorDash. I live in an apartment complex and see tons of orders coming in. So, maybe it sucks for the restaurants and that should be fix but it seems hard to knock Google for doing what their metrics say people actually want. Their metrics probably say people want to order food and so they tried to provide that info. There no need for to apply "evil" motivations. Good intentions gets the same result.
No, Google is far from helpless in detection of these types of issues. Business owners should be able to claim and manage the features which are enabled on their accounts, and nothing should be enabled by default beyond the basic contact info and possibly reviews.
I passed on a case like this years ago -- a restaurant claimed Google hijacked the listing, it turns out they had signed a B2B deal with some food delivery/ordering app that had, in the terms, the right to share this info with others, including Google. Good luck to the restaurant here, but they won't get the same benefit of the doubt consumers (sometimes) get when signing contracts.
I was just in a coffee shop the other day and a man was telling the clerk he called in an order, and they took it, and he is there to pick it up. The shop had no record of this, and the number that he called was not their number. He said that is really weird, I talked to someone and they took my order.
I remembered the dark pattern deployed by GrubHub, and googled the shop. Sure enough the number was the same as the one the man called. The shop had no idea that this was going on, and apparently GrubHub failed to forward that order. This is being done with little or no indication to either party that someone is in the middle.
Isn't this fraud, on the part of Google, Grub Hub, or both? The customer thinks they're dealing with the business, but one of these two services has MITM'd the service, passing themselves off as the business.
I pulled the plug on Google Search about two months ago and switched to Brave's new search engine. It works for me. Search is a tough product because nearly every way you come up with to monetize it counts in either diluting the SERPs with paid listings or diverting clicks to something other than what the user is looking for. I.e. I search for a movie and get the Google movie listing instead of a listing for the website for the actual movie.
On Brave Search: I've had to use Google search twice in the past month, and it was useful one of those times, so Brave has been fantastic so far. In the past,the new search engine usually lasts about 3-4 days and I give up and go back to Google. This time... well... still using Brave.
Monetization wouldn’t be an issue if we paid for these services. I’d be willing to pay $5-10 a month for a good search engine that respects your privacy. But I guess the average person hates the idea of paying for any software these days.
As much as I subscribe to this perspective, when I think about how much money must be flowing through these ecosystems, I wonder if that's the real price point?
I mean theoretically how much would you be willing to pay for search that has no advertisement.
$1000 a year?
I'm genuinely curious, what would a privacy first non-advertising based approach cost? I mean I suspect you could discount it by not tracking individual users but instead just advertise on results searched, but what does the extreme version of this cost like do you think?
What kind of money do we need to put on the table that someone serving it goes, you know what, let's just provide a great search product, if we start trying to mess around with ads / tracking, we're risking killing this golden goose?
It's substantial friction. You pay for a search engine, another search engine, a documentation site, YouTube, Hacker News, 50 different newspapers...
What I want is some fixed revenue-sharing service a la YouTube Premium but for the entire Internet. Pay $XX/month, and get access to a zillion websites, with each one receiving revenue proportional to how much you use it.
Except the websites would probably game that by loading a zillion empty iframes or something. Damn.
I got curious about this and wanted to spitball some numbers. According to a Google search, Google's average user "conducts 3-4 searches each day." Nobody goes into details, so we don't know if those include subsequent searches or the average number of pages they looked at -- though I think we can assume that would be pretty close to 1, as most people are going to find what they're looking for in the first few results.
Let's say the average searches per day is 4 and they are general enough queries to be showing ads, of which there are an average of 3 per page. It would be a mix of CPM and clicks, but each placement will average out to roughly $0.007 in revenue. That's 360 ads per month resulting in ~$2.50 per user.
Of course, that doesn't include the specific overhead of brokering the ads or developing and maintaining such a bizarrely complicated system, and it's safe to assume their margins are at most 20-30%. So, after expending all of that effort in creating this anti-privacy, anti-consumer, anti-competitive system that's rigged against both the advertisers and users, they're making a whopping $0.75/mo per search user.
Which is all to say that if search were simply search, then they could: charge $10/year for an ad-free and privacy-focused service, drastically simplify their entire infrastructure, reassign the ad support staff toward much-needed consumer issues, and actually be making more money in the process. However, this doesn't include Maps or other services, which is how they convert that $0.75/mo search user into a $10/mo ecosystem addict (or $1,000/mo supporter of content creators).
Search is the method for directing traffic where they want it to go, and the trick is to also be making money from all of those places, with even more profitable ads or salable products. I think any search engine will struggle with this when it inevitably grows beyond its core product, because the alternative is a mess of different companies, products, APIs and methodologies that barely work together -- moral high ground wages aren't exactly an ingredient for explosive, cohesive and industry-competitive innovation.
Open the neighbouring comment thread about YouTube Vanced and you'll see that even an average HNer thinks asking for payment is an insult to their very being.
This always bothers me. I won't click the "Order Online" button anymore. I'll look for the restaurants website (which often isn't the Website button either) and order directly.
If I ran a restaurant, I would never partner with these platforms directly. Let them sell your food, but don't take a loss on the sale just so they can take some profit. I doubt there's much new customer acquisition through these platforms to justify the cost.
The worst thing about hotel rates is the hotels themselves basically force you to go through a third party unless you want to pay their insane markups. You'd think they'd want you to book directly too...
Readit News
Google search results have become dangerous (for lack of a better word) and really hard to use when searching for some things lately. I shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize every link ON Google and then double check I'm actually ending up where Google said it was sending me. I understand they want to squeeze every possible dollar out of every search, but I no longer trust them for certain searches.
I'm not even talking about the results, this is just what's on the actual Google search results page. There's just way too many ads and other tricks like this happening.
I've noticed it only a handful of times, but phone numbers for listings, can't be trusted either anymore [1]
GrubHub also does it: there has been more than one occasion where I've searched a restaurant in a new town while traveling for work, called the phone number to inquire about a menu item thinking I was dialing the restaurant but I had instead dialed a GrubHub or Goggle contact center.
At first I didn't realize what was going on, but quickly put it together after ordering from a restaurant that appeared in Google, using the "order form" and getting a phone call from a different voice telling me the item I ordered hadn't been sold by the restaurant in weeks due to sourcing issues.
"I just spoke with Mark, he said you do sell it"
"We don't have anyone named Mark working here"
I go check the listing again, check the phone number, and ask the person on the other end of the line what the restaurant business telephone number is: sure enough it's a completely different number.
Not sure how widespread this is or how to tell which restaurant phone numbers on these platforms take me to someone actually at the establishment, but....well...shit like this.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-res.... (article is from 2019 but this has happened to me as recently as oct/2021)
Ah yes, if it wasn't for GrubHub, we would all starve!
I've never seen the middle-man parasite's lie exposed this clearly. People have been ordering direct from restaurants for ages, but now that Yelp/Grubhub managed to muscle their way between restaurants and customers, they take credit for this entire business existing, to justify their sleazy practices.
It always amazes me that the government is never concerned with things is SHOULD BE, instead is very concerned with things that should be none of its business.
Now I'm a bit skeptical that the city collectively got up at the ass-crack of dawn to make a dinner reservation on a random weeknight, so I go visit the restaurant website and they have a wide open calendar. Had I not scrutinized the Google offerings the restaurant would have lost out on my business.
IANAL but that whole offering on the part of Google just seems morally wrong if not some form of fraudulent.
I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.
like by door dash via the generic: https://order.online/en-US/
For example this is a doordash site (set up by the restaurant): https://order.online/business/-54797/en-US
A restaurant tried to call me about an order, but coming from a toll free number I ignored it. I asked them why they didn't have a local number. They could only call me back via the door dash number as my number wasn't provided to the restaurant. It was weird.
Around here the local restaurant POS vendor exposed their interface online and made and app for pickups. I'll use that directly if I'm ordering from a place that uses it. Thats a little fraught too, because the staff has to learn to use that too (staff has to have some training on turing online ordering on or off..which they sometimes have forgotten to do)
https://pos.toasttab.com
Ycombinator is enabling this kind of behavior, either historically or currently.
I think that YC should audit what their prospective, current, and older companies are doing, and avoid or forbid unethical and/or illegal behavior. And barring active influence, they should outwardly denounce companies that choose to engage in these kinds of scams.
(I have a private plugin that does company searches and sees if they are a YC company. You'd be really surprised just how many negative articles are YC founded companies.)
Edit: and the downvotes commence
When I was interning for a consultancy one of my assignments was to create a system that could be placed in restaurants to mitm printer jobs so that our low fee delivery service could scrape phone numbers and emails from third party delivery receipts and send coupons to get customers to switch to our service. Doordash probably figured out this sort of stuff was happening so took all the identifying info out of their service?
I get a nice consistent interface, it remembers my name/payment across the different restaurants that use it, and as far as I've seen they're not a raw deal for the restaurant. Square I think is pretty similar? Though I just don't personally see as many places using it for online ordering.
This Google feature unfortunately seems to favor the high-commission major apps in its listings, though the "native" one where Google itself shows an ordering interface seems to be a no-commission DoorDash thing, at least for the restaurants I've seen? Which still has "extra-middleman" problems but at least isn't so bad financially.
My guess is that most restaurants don’t even know where to begin when it comes to suing something like Google. At least that’s how I would feel.
You have to make a real effort to avoid their crap hurdles just to make it to the damn restaurant’s own website.
The problem is the ordering platforms enabling this integration without restaurant consent. (Or, perhaps worse, offering orders without restaurant consent?)
Google just provides an API that allows restaurant ordering from Maps, Search etc. It connects to the ordering platforms (e.g., DoorDash) [1]. The ordering platforms integrate with this API by uploading data feeds and implementing a server with specific interface. [2]
I don't think Google even takes a cut!
I worked on an integration to a similar API, "Reserve with Google" [3]. With that one, at least, it can be enabled/disabled at the restaurant level. I assume that "Order with Google" is similar.
[1] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering
[2] https://developers.google.com/actions/food-ordering/guides/b...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/reserve/
For many years Google had run their search engine as a trusted source for indexed search with advertising subtly placed. Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.
I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges. It's so bad now that the only way I can ensure that I'm not being overcharged for no good reason is to order by phone or directly at restaurants. There is very little value added to so many online businesses now because of twisted Internet schemes like this.
Slightly off topic, but as an example of this, I did a search for the manufacturer part number of a brushed DC motor the other day. It was just a randomish string of characters like S-5672 or something, and under image results and all the results were completely unrelated pictures of an entirely different brushless motor that I had recently purchased. The seeming effect of this is that Google knew I was looking for a specific product, and chose to show me a competing product instead, despite them not being comparable.
> I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges.
That's definitely true, but that's not what's being discussed.
Do you mean for restaurant results specifically or all Google Search results? Big difference if both.
The lawsuit seems to focus on the history of how that happened a bit. Namely Google seems to have initially tried to sell this API to restaurants directly. Hence the brazen trademark infringement and restaurant impersonation, it was intended to operate with the authorization of the restaurants directly. Only when that failed did they move on to third party distributors that didn't have any right to the trademarks, without changing the now deceptive interface.
> I don't think Google even takes a cut!
The lawsuit is a bit unclear on that (through information and belief) but also cites alternative revenue streams through ads and pushing more people onto its own payment platform.
...which was a fools errand. It is impossible to expect individual restaurants (_maybe_ aside from large restaurant groups - ie, big chains) to integrate with this API.
To me it seems much more likely that Google pivoted to working directly with delivery operators for practical reasons to make the product functional.
I would also bet that contracts with the delivery operators include a bit about how they will enable this integration and what that means. Perhaps they do not make it explicit enough in the sales cycle (or, didn't in the case of Lime)
The nature of the partnership between Google and the delivery firm is not directly relevant to the restaurant's loss of revenue. They could be building a future business, they could be compensated in an indirect fashion (ex. those who pay more to AdSense get a preferential treatment) etc.
DoorDash has made an effort to streamline the process. If to-go orders are an option then you really don’t get a choice in who I send to pick it up.
I'm not quite willing to call it fraud yet, but it's in that area.
It’s a classic case of internalizing the gains and externalizing the costs.
Deleted Comment
If it's the delivery operator's business model to buy ads to get a cut of an order, then, we should be upset with the delivery operator.
(edit: removed off topic and specific business)
> I don't think Google even takes a cut!
Yes officer, I did leave the bank door unlocked as a favor to my friend, but I didn't even get any of the stolen money!
Yet there's no lawsuit against the thief.
> We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature
It could of course be a lie, but that seems like a bad strategy.
IIRC Google didn't take a cut on restaurant reservations, at least
Anyway, when I got home I did some searching and found out the restaurant had a different webpage from what I ordered from. The prices I paid were a little higher than the actual business websites. It seems postmates charged me more, taking a cut while doing nothing to make the food or deliver it. What a parasitic business to inject yourself as a third party like that.
Zomato needs to be banned from Google maps.
This is just techbro euphemism for "lie to your users."
I like to order stuff of any service from their website. Usually, the play/app store apps are filled with ads, trackers, spyware.
Needless to say, the food was incorrectly ordered, an hour late and cold. To top it all off, they attempted to charge me for the difference in price. Luckily, I put a stop to this via my credit card, and have boycotted Doordash since.
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon amongst the various food delivery companies, despite being obvious fraud.
My mother got scammed by the flowers version by clicking on a Google Ad and not realizing she was dealing with a middleman that was doing nothing more than adding $50 to local prices and calling in orders. And when people that don't realize what's going on feel like they got ripped off, the real business seems to be the one that gets the bad review.
The easiest thing to do is to assume Google is nothing but spam and scams. I'm convinced there's a market opportunity for local web indexes similar to what Yahoo used to be because there's nothing to use for discovery that isn't trying to scam you.
Take away the delivery companies’ bad practices, you take away the Google experience the restaurants don’t like.
I think it makes the most sense to hold Google responsible here since they are in the best position to solve the problem and they're not showing any inclination to do so.
How would Google know which postings are fraudulent and which aren't? The vast majority of these postings are fine/legitimate/consented. Why does it have to be Google that spends time and energy going after the bad actors, and if they don't, they become one?
In other words, I really don't see how Google is in the best position to figure out which restaurants have been posted without the restaurant's consent. I think that would be the companies putting up the original post.
Google could temporarily delist those sites and instantly get them to stop.
I remembered the dark pattern deployed by GrubHub, and googled the shop. Sure enough the number was the same as the one the man called. The shop had no idea that this was going on, and apparently GrubHub failed to forward that order. This is being done with little or no indication to either party that someone is in the middle.
On Brave Search: I've had to use Google search twice in the past month, and it was useful one of those times, so Brave has been fantastic so far. In the past,the new search engine usually lasts about 3-4 days and I give up and go back to Google. This time... well... still using Brave.
I mean theoretically how much would you be willing to pay for search that has no advertisement.
$1000 a year?
I'm genuinely curious, what would a privacy first non-advertising based approach cost? I mean I suspect you could discount it by not tracking individual users but instead just advertise on results searched, but what does the extreme version of this cost like do you think?
What kind of money do we need to put on the table that someone serving it goes, you know what, let's just provide a great search product, if we start trying to mess around with ads / tracking, we're risking killing this golden goose?
What I want is some fixed revenue-sharing service a la YouTube Premium but for the entire Internet. Pay $XX/month, and get access to a zillion websites, with each one receiving revenue proportional to how much you use it.
Except the websites would probably game that by loading a zillion empty iframes or something. Damn.
Let's say the average searches per day is 4 and they are general enough queries to be showing ads, of which there are an average of 3 per page. It would be a mix of CPM and clicks, but each placement will average out to roughly $0.007 in revenue. That's 360 ads per month resulting in ~$2.50 per user.
Of course, that doesn't include the specific overhead of brokering the ads or developing and maintaining such a bizarrely complicated system, and it's safe to assume their margins are at most 20-30%. So, after expending all of that effort in creating this anti-privacy, anti-consumer, anti-competitive system that's rigged against both the advertisers and users, they're making a whopping $0.75/mo per search user.
Which is all to say that if search were simply search, then they could: charge $10/year for an ad-free and privacy-focused service, drastically simplify their entire infrastructure, reassign the ad support staff toward much-needed consumer issues, and actually be making more money in the process. However, this doesn't include Maps or other services, which is how they convert that $0.75/mo search user into a $10/mo ecosystem addict (or $1,000/mo supporter of content creators).
Search is the method for directing traffic where they want it to go, and the trick is to also be making money from all of those places, with even more profitable ads or salable products. I think any search engine will struggle with this when it inevitably grows beyond its core product, because the alternative is a mess of different companies, products, APIs and methodologies that barely work together -- moral high ground wages aren't exactly an ingredient for explosive, cohesive and industry-competitive innovation.
I should be able to share my 'shitlist' with other users and see the rank of my shitlist domains that are included on other's shitlist.
If I ran a restaurant, I would never partner with these platforms directly. Let them sell your food, but don't take a loss on the sale just so they can take some profit. I doubt there's much new customer acquisition through these platforms to justify the cost.
They’re just an aggregator and get paid in referral fees. The value for you is in the aggregation engine.