People to connect with state and local businesses. Its a service that empowers and protects consumers, allows people to discover great local gyms and a way for consumers to warn fellow consumers about not serving businesses. Host how many visitors a month did you have . Guest depending on how you want to break it out, theres folks that access it via mobile web, via the website, via the app. Its about, north of 100 Million People and then we had over 200 million reviews that have been submitted. Host how do you make money . Guest not unlike Services Like google, Search Engines, it is a vertical Search Engine, basically if i do a search for a dentist in san diego, there are a handful of dentists who are paying to basically have a sponsored clearly labeled as such link that lives up of the organic search results and, therefore, they get more discovery of the business and more people, or patients coming through their the door. Host you are the senior vp for Public Policy so obviously we have you on the communicators to talk about some Public Policy issues. In recent testimony in the senate you are quoted as saying quote, google has conditioned consumers to expect for the best and most relevant results from around the web, even though they no longer were by doing so. Google physically demoted nongoogle results even if they contain information with Higher Quality scores than the information. What does that mean . Guest yelp and google have added long and complicated relationship, and today one of the key things i do in my role is try to educate policymakers not just in the United States in terms of state attorney general and department of justice, but also the European Commission, antitrust authorities and australia and brazil and turkey, that a website that we want trusted and relied upon to match consumers with the best information from across the web when they came to google. Com, its no longer doing that. Today the majority of traffic that goes to google ends up either terminate on google or going to google second or pages, so it stays on google. Com and winds up going to some type of secondary page inside their Walled Garden. That wasnt always the case. If you rewind the 2004, 15 or 16 years ago when google went public, larry page was quoted in these quotes that are actually included in their s1 documents when they filed for ipo with the sec, hes quoted as saying at google want to get you onto google and out into the web as quickly as possible. In fact, thats the entire point. Today, not only is that not true, but google is during all this traffic to itself and, therefore, in a sense the oxygenating the entire World Wide Web and stifling innovation and ultimately harming consumers because theyre not getting access to the best information from across the limit. Host license would be a yelp would depend on google in many ways. Guest its a codependency. When google started it at sort of a dual pledge to consumers. It was a come to google and you will never use altavista or yahoo ever again. The webmasters it was listen, focus on cultivating great content and architecture site in these particular ways and you will be rewarded with an audience. It was this symbiotic bargain that the google ended with all these webmasters in the sense that google needed robust, helpful content to exist on the internet, so it could serve relative results and, of course, the trade was google within reward people that were good at cultivating helpful usergenerated content with an audience. Yelp is an example of one of the services. Wikipedia is of course another drama before we go any further we want to bring leah nylen into this conversation. Shes with politico. Think its a much. Last week the judiciary hearing had the Judiciary Committee had hung on self preference on the issue you can talk about where a company gets more benefits to its own products as opposed to third party. In your view how does google preference self products . Guest its worth taking a step back and think it helped ubiquitous and for the producta tool google is for consumers in terms of helping them discover information across the internet. Today when a mom to search for pediatrician in st. Louis, its most likely being done on a smartphone device, either for iphone or android device. 65 of all search goes through smart phones. Over half a smart phone search has local intent. It includes, involves a consumer looking for local business. When she does a search for a pediatrician in st. Louis, instead of being matched with the best information across the web, above the organic results hardwired to the top of that page is a map with links to businesses. But instead of those links going to thirdparty services, its steering users into a secondary page on google. Com. Thats problematic because what google collects information that it served up, it is a yelp want to be if you will, is objectively lower quality information. The average Character Counts are smaller, the rating distributions are skewed in such a way where theres a strong evidence that span is running rampant. It has misinformation problem because theyre not investing in the commiserate level of human and algorithmic generation to ensure that people when they find information on google can trust that its a good predictor of the offline experience. Thats not to say yelp information should be in there necessarily pick it turns out an entire ecosystem of thirdparty Services Like yelp, Health Grades that might offer more reviews, richer information for that query. Why does google get to exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates for relevant result in that type of search . Thats what i think that hearing was about in terms of self preference. Can you talk about how has yelp been impacted by google self referencing . Guest sure. If we rewind the clock to 15 years ago and imagine what the experience was for consumer doing a search on google, its hard to decouple the rise of what tim oreilly, this term that tim oreilly popularized, web 2. 0. From the rise of google itself. Its this idea that google used to be a turnstile. It used to defuse virtually 100 of its traffic to the World Wide Web. That pediatrician st. Louis search 15, 16 years ago you could imagine 100 people doing that Search Engines for the sake of argument lets say on average ten of them diffused out to the web, to the ten blue links on page one. Each site on page one gets ten users today as just a baseline about seven in ten of those clicks, smart phones are going into googles products. That same 100 people, 70 are just inside googles Walled Garden while the webcast content and fight for those 30 remaining clicks. That gives you an idea of quantitative impact. Of course the internet is a lot bigger today so we have lots more searching as a technically sound Services Like yelp have grown over time and thats a good thing, but the truth is that our 2 billion types of searches like this everyday on planet earth come local searches come people looking for something of low stakes as slice of pizza to something that is highstakes like an auto mechanic for pediatrician. Instead of being matched with the best information from across the web they are being speared unwittingly into this lower quality product you mention yelp is been vocal about all around the world and in particular in europe. How has the eu responded to some of the concerns you have raised . Guest im glad you asked because its important to remember that the European Commission took up these questions immediately after the federal trade commission about seven years ago decided not to take action, and i think one decides not to take action against the dominant firm in an antitrust investigation after you as the regulator, youve been persuaded that is the company in question is that going to be as big in a few years, perhaps theres going to be more startups and so forth in that space. I think its fair to say the decision to abruptly close the ftcs investigation to google in 2013, that decision has not aged well. One of the reasons it has not clearly is that europe look at the same set of evidence, took a little bit more time to carefully that the evidence, and came to the opposite conclusion and ultimately issued a finding of guilt for these practices against google. Do you think the European Commission to inject greater competition into search has been successful . Guest its a bit of a mixed bag. Im very thankful for the work of the European Commission on this in the leadership and, frankly, i dont think the socalled tech flash would exist without april 2015 april 2015 g she was willing to square shoulders with one of these large companies. On the other hand, the commission chose to take a pretty narrow case, the socalled comparisonshopping vertical. Basically, how we shop for products online. It was originally filed in 2010 and i would argue they are sending an ambulance to the funeral. That that industry has already been vanquished. Googles entrance into the market distorted it, created a Landing Strip for jeff bezos to come in and effectively conquer online shopping, and it may result in a helpful precedent but ultimately those markets have already tipped into a a wy that they cannot be salvaged. And so i am thankful for their enforcement action. Im not sure i wouldve taken the same theory of harm. Host is it fair to say youre looking at google as more of a public utility and a private company . Guest i dont know if i would go that far. I think that google has the right to innovate. They have the right to create great product. They won on the merits, general search. The page rank algorithm, the type of quality scores they develop in the late 90s clearly was a different shaded product, and thats what everybody ultimately flocked to google. The problem is when you, what you establish that dominance, and this happened about a decade into googles existence, they introduced, they were running originally organic search results and advertisements. I dont think thats controversial. It was when the begin introducing this third category of information, answer boxes. Sometimes an answer box isnt that controversial. In fact, when someone types in n 2 2 i think we can all agree that is a pretty good for consumers, hey, i did not to go to calculate. Com and reenter that thing. But if youre doing the search for the auto mechanic in madison, wisconsin, why would you exclude the entire World Wide Web as candidates of relevant results so google can put this exclusionary box at the top of the page . Thats whats happening today in the common categories search, a conservative estimates as 40 of all Google Searches have this type of local intent. Im not sure it requires turning them into public utility to fix that. I know some have talked about certain aspects of the business, like maybe the google maps are factbased information were stuff is in the world is a fact and they have clearly dominated that space as well. Perhaps that could be in every to look at, but were not calling for the. Host so what is the public part solution to the complaint that yelp has about google . Guest i think its the same, you know, we have tools and the United States to do with abuse of dominance and its our antitrust laws. That sherman section two. We saw this ironically in the late 90s with u. S. Versus microsoft which most have antitt storage will tell you today that the trial was the remedy. Though many red may remember a stalemate between u. S. Government and his giant company from redmond, washington, that dragged on 2006, that by enforcing the antitrust law, the tendency of microsoft to sort of scan the landscape and ask themselves, gosh, what new markets can be bulldozed into today with our dominant operating system and browsers . They couldnt do that as easily. The company that erotically benefit from that the most was google. Six months after u. S. Versus microsoft was filed, google was born in a garage. Microsoft had 90 market share at the time on internet explorer. Explorer. You can easily imagine the alternative universe or microsoft were bill gates said looks like all or use going to this Google Search engine site and thats where the action is on the internet. Why dont we read their original Research Papers come through 15 15 Million Research at the problem and steer people to our own Search Engine . They couldve strangled google in the crib but that didnt happen because i think the product managers and engineers at microsoft at the time were probably hasnt email lawyers to see if they could go to the water fountain, let alone enter adjacent markets. Some Competition Advocates have raised questions about whether u. S. Antitrust law is capable of addressing some of these concerns. Do you think u. S. Antitrust laws are robust enough or does it need to be changed . Guest i think that the question we get often, you know, should we use existing frameworks to do with a company like google or do we need to pass new laws . My response is typically yes, because i think that any tools we can bring to bear to give enforcers of power to address these difficult issues, we are supportive of. That said, i think that there is a framework to use existing law to bring a u. S. Versus microsoft stock case against google. I think there are unfortunately over the last couple of decades has been a culture under enforcement that we need to overcome. Congress stepping in and even proposing these laws helps address that issue, that problem that our agencies, enforcement agencies are being a bit gun check. The entire zeitgeist has shifted. People want some type of enforcement against large Tech Companies, and i think the u. S. Government has the tools to do it and theres no harm in bringing new tools to the table as well. I do like to about a couple other topics. You had mentioned, and windows that misinformation is sort of a pretty serious problem on the web. How does yelp deal with questions about this information in fake reviews frederick its a really important question. In fact, its been top of mine since day one. Our ceo, jeremy stallman, was part of the socalled paypal mafia which was a group of early employees at paypal in the late 90s, and people forget about this. In the early days the concept of sin over the internet the email was just insane and so they were getting besieged by fraud and every day new cyber criminal was defrauding more of the customers. So they had, they were losing 1 million that it front anyone came out of the experience with a view that what can go wrong will go wrong. We need to almost over correct on this problem. And be aware that when we go on to build new companies that this has to be top of mind. Very early on in yelps existence we saw what were obvious fake reviews, and as such i develop an integrated part upon software recommendation, the system, a filter, algorithm so to speak that allows every single day looks at her 200 million plus reviews and examines things like the user ip address, the activity and things where its hoping to make basically an accurate prediction. It works. Pretty good. If you think about crummy business experience youve had an go crosscheck it on yelp, i have a ninth of ten personal success rate in the anecdotal method. It is a very good predictor of f the offline experience and a think its because we willing to accept false positives. Sometimes that glowing fivestar review from your cousin mary is not going to make it on your yelp page. Thats going to irritate the Business Owner. Its led to a lot of conspiracy theories frankly, its our willingness to err on the side of caution and ultimately better predict consumer soft on uplinks print that is made is so popular with consumers. Host on the flipside, consumers reliable for negative reviews . Guest its a great question, an important question. In certain instances yes, of course, that the consumer god gd for bid is using our platform to defang a business, they should be held liable and the business is well within its right to sue that individual. On the other hand, and, frankly, more often what we see is overly litigious businesses imagine a grad student writing a negative review, and honest negative review about an experience with maybe a shady dentist that they had. This dentist is just thinskinned and calls his lawyer buddy and says i want to get this for you all be in it. Can we write them a scary letter . They send the letter and most of the time the user will just pull that information off the web. They will say i dont want to enter into a lawsuit with this deeppocketed dentist. And the antidote to this, franco, a Public Policy problem for consumers is antislapp laws. Stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation, states like texas have strong ones. An example of using the grad student can go to a defense attorney, the defense attorney could go seek an injunction against the dentist and actually get attorneys fees and find the dentist for that. Some states have no antislapp foster at the federal of web know at the stop also this is not issued yelp works on is working to ensure that the environment for all my free speech is hospitable. Again, we want to make sure this is his have the right to sue individuals if god for bid there is defamation on the web, but where when we see a much more pronounced problem is people using the courts as a way to silence critics, and that we believe is wrong and we want to do a begin to advocate for laws which minimize that. So one thing thats very top of mind right now is the coronavirus pandemic which is changing a lot about how americans are working in socializing. I think its probably impacting a lot of the local businesses that you guys have reviews on like restaurant and bars in gyms and things of that nature. How is yelp responding to the coronavirus traffic im so glad you asked because ive been at yelp for 12 years and its been one of the