Those are some pretty serious accusations, but it doesn't take much to poke holes in the study. To start, there's an elephant in the room: Yelp has a vested interest in portraying Google as anti-competitive, since that lends fuel to antitrust cases which might force Google to give alternatives a higher ranking. There's a concern that Yelp's data team is crafting worst-case scenarios that don't really match up with your real-life experience. Whether or not you believe Google when it tells us that Yelp is relying on "flawed methodology" and "cherry-picked queries," it's hard to deny that profit motivations taint the data.

Also, the researchers don't present the findings in their full context. Yelp is quick to say that people are more likely to engage with the results when third-party links get better treatment, but it's not giving a good sense of the scale. As Danny Sullivan explains to Motherboard, 45 percent more than a tiny amount doesn't mean anything. Also, this doesn't mean that the competing services are actually better, or that you'd see the same problem with a wider range of queries and a much larger population. While this doesn't eliminate the worry that Google is stifling rivals by downplaying their pages, it'd likely take a much broader, more neutral analysis to justify those fears.

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