“ Google Places is now clearly going after Yelp, and the main way they can do that is by providing users with solid restaurant reviews. Some of that content is coming through Google’s agreements with outfits like Zagats and TripAdvisor, but a ton of it is coming from Yelp content that Google is simply getting by crawling it with their search spiders. And the only way Yelp could block this content from Google’s all-seeing eye is by no-indexing their entire site — a move which would effectively kill them since so much of their traffic comes from Google Search results.”
So Google tries to buy Yelp for their data, Yelp balks, Google indexes data anyway.
This is perhaps the best example for why product extensions around Google’s search business (like travel or local reviews) is monopolistic behavior.
Can one change Robots.txt to opt out of one Google product but not another? (Via TechCrunch)
Source: TechCrunch
