Stop promoting evil behavior of Yelp.com in your search engine

Hi Brave search designer,

can you disconnect search results with Yelp.com? Yelp is famous to extort/blackmail businesses for better reviews.

Is Brave somewhat associated with Yelp? Or is Yelp paying Brave for ads?

By adding yelp review into any local businesses directly is to encourage such kind of extortion and blackmail behavior of yelp. This would discourage many businesses owners to use brave.

For example, when you search for our summer camp: “Integem Summer Camp” or “Integem”. yelp is automatically there to associated with our listing. If you check there was 4 bad one-star. And if you dig into the reviews, you will find that there are 59 five-star real customer reviews purposefully hided by Yelp as " reviews for Integem that are not currently recommended".

A company needs to pay Yelp thousands of dollars in order to be able to keep their good review scores.

Here is a news to provide you detailed information how Yelp would use bad reviews to extort money from small businesses: https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/.

Here is Yelp BBB (better business bureau review): It is 1.11 over 5 with grade C+. Over 1942 complains in the past three years. C+ grading for BBB simply is bad: https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/internet-service/yelpcom-1116-193927

I believe Brave’s goal is to become a trustworthy platform and bring positive impact to the world. Your automatic promotion of evil behavior like Yelp would truly disappointed your users and bring your credits down.

Please stop connecting Yelp faked reviews with websites in your search results. Thank you!
Sincerley,
Jason

1 Like

What you are asking is censorship. Blocking certain sites because you do not like them.
This is exactly what we, the users, do not need. We want transparency. We don’t want to be denied access to things based on someone’s else opinion. For the good and for the bad. We want to be shown everything and decide ourselves what is good and what is bad. :slight_smile:

@support123 Let me first share something from Brave:

No, Brave Search does not filter, downrank, or censor search results. Nor will we change our search algorithm to increase or decrease the prominence of results in response to current events or anyone’s political, religious, ethical, or other beliefs. Brave Search—like Brave itself—is intended to be a user-first portal to the web, free of Big Tech’s manipulation.

However, there is one exception to this rule: We do need to comply with laws governing search engines, including CSAM, copyright takedown (DMCA), right to be forgotten (GDPR), and nation-state orders.

A few additional notes:

For each of the cases above, if the results are censored, filtered, or re-ranked at the source, those changes would also pass through to our results. You can easily see how often these third-party results are mixed (via our independence score), and our aim is to gradually reduce this mixing over time.

So no, Brave won’t censor out something because you don’t like it. What YOU can do though, is use Goggles to change what results you do see. You can learn more about Goggles at the links below:

3 Likes

This is not censorship. Brave.com search result would particularly highlight yelp result at the right side. This is a special promotion of yelp results.

What I am asking is that Brave shall remove that right side results and stop promoting yelp in particular.

If you check bing.com or google.com, none of them would put yelp results at the right side.

Thank you for the response.
There are two things that Brave would need to improve:

  1. remove the right side special promotion of Yelp. Because neither google or bing puts yelp results on the right side.

Brave result:

Google result

bing result

  1. Yelp ranked much higher in brave than google or bing results. In both google and bing, yelp results are not on the first page. But in brave, yelp results were ranked very top. You can also check any other local business search results, yelp results are consistently ranked much higher in brave than google and bing, and most times, yelp results are on the first page in brave. But in bing and google, yelp results are often listed on second or third pages or even lower.

Note: I used “incognito window” of chrome to check.

2 Likes

Maybe it’s a mistake, or perhaps it’s an advertisement. Of course, it’s not easy to say this is cheating. Everything will soon be resolved, and the values will return. When I was promoting my website, it wasn’t so noticeable. I consulted with lawyers at https://www.digitalforensics.com/sextortion on various issues, and they showed me how this system works. It will be much easier for me to do this if no one interferes with me.