You're right, they must have done the right thing since they knew more at the time.

That's how online social communities like this work. I like to call it "the democratization of punditry."

I don't disagree with your diagnosis of the prevalence of armchair CEOing around here, but Yelp is indeed concerned about Google.

Yelp and a couple other companies forced in Google to a Congressional hearing where senators attacked Google over having too much power over other sites. Yelp gets a SIGNIFICANT amount of its traffic from google searches. So if Google arbitrarily decided to promote its own restaurant reviews from Zagat after a user search, this would crush Yelp's traffic.

That analogy doesn't really work. If BP or Exxon refuses to support Ford's vehicle, there are other people to supply the fuel. If Google drops Yelp's ranking, there is no other search engine who is going to fulfill that traffic source that was just yanked from Yelp.

But yes, I agree that it's a problem that most websites face, not just Yelp.

No, I think the gp is referencing the fact that 75 (seriously, 75!!!) percent of yelps traffic comes in from google [1]. You have to view that as basically a failure of the company and the brand. Instead of going to yelp for a review, people just search in google. This also obviously leaves them enormously exposed to changes in Google's algorithms, whether intended to affect yelp or not. (Cue the google employees with their usual church and state / separation of search from other product lines story. Sorry, not buying it. And even if it's true now, some day a beancounter will win and it won't be.)

There are lots of companies that are far more of a destination than yelp -- the obvious contrast is facebook. I'd bet very little of their traffic is google search driven. Weaning themselves from dependence on Google should be one of the top goals for any web company.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/21/stoppelman-75-of-yelps-traf...

I'd rather see Zagat succeed than Yelp.