Luther Lowe, policy chief at review website Yelp, has been on a crusade against Google for the better part of the last decade.
This week, after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they would be stepping down from their roles as CEO and president of Google’s parent company, Lowe had some choice words about this latest development.
“It is about two guys who founded a legally shady monopoly and have never publicly answered for it sprinting toward escape hatches as law enforcement closes in,” Lowe said on Twitter.
The decision comes at a time when federal government regulators such as the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are intensifying their scrutiny of big tech companies.
A key part of Lowe’s job as director of government affairs at Yelp (which competes with Google when it comes to customer reviews) is trying to convince antitrust regulators and the public at large that Google’s search engine is in many instances a force for evil. But his passionate pleas against Google stem from a fiercely personal and philosophical opposition.
“Google is intentionally mismatching consumers 2 billion times a day,” Lowe told the Washington Examiner during an interview at Yelp’s Washington office, which mostly functions as a call center and where he is one of the only employees focused on Google.
Lowe, 37, is from Arkansas and has a slight Southern drawl. He went to William & Mary for college and served in the Army National Guard before going into public policy. He joined Yelp in 2008 as a lowly account executive and eventually made a name for himself within government affairs, which he now heads.
He says his fight against Google is “heartbreaking” because he used to be a “huge Google fanboy,” and it was Google that first inspired him to move to Silicon Valley and be a part of the tech industry. Lowe said this was because Google used to be a “beacon on the hill” within the industry.
Google was initially created to help people get the information they needed by getting people into the web as quickly as possible for answers. It initially functioned as a “turnstile” to the internet, Lowe said. Page himself admitted this when Google went public in 2004.
However, in 2007, Google started changing its algorithms and parts of its business model to ensure that users began and ended their search on Google itself. Google realized it could make more money and gather more data from consumers if they spent more time on its own products and services rather than that of others. Whether it’s through Google Shopping, reviews, YouTube, or even just its calculator function, Google started to be the beginning and endpoint for more and more searches.
Lowe highlights that for searches related to where one lives, otherwise known as “local searches” (which make up 40% of all searches), the majority of traffic that lands on Google from such searches either terminates on Google or is sent to secondary pages for services Google offers.
Although not its initial purpose, Lowe says Google now “steers internet traffic to itself in a walled garden fashion.”
Google says it’s only acting in the best interest of consumers by making it faster and easier to get questions answered. So what’s the problem?
Lowe says Google frequently uses low-quality information that doesn’t give consumers the most accurate or helpful answer.
When a consumer is doing a low-stake search for something such as pizza, a mismatch based on Google’s low-quality information might not be such a big deal, says Lowe. However, when someone is searching for a pediatrician for his or her child and they are mismatched, that’s a big problem, he noted.
Lowe says the reason that Google’s data is of poor quality when it comes to local searches and reviews is that it has a monopoly in the search business. Therefore, it doesn’t have to think hard about accurately predicting people’s offline experience the way Yelp does, Lowe said.
Google’s content is “a dumpster fire,” Lowe said, with its rating distribution skewed very close to five stars. That suggests that its reviews have been overrun with “five-star spam,” Lowe said, which means businesses are more likely to write fake positive reviews about themselves and fake negative ones about their competitors.
“Google actually is a really great company, when they don’t try to put their hand on the scale and participate in this type of self-serving bias,” said Lowe.
“And so, I, as a user, I’m aware of that type of self-serving bias, and so I can avoid, you know, the bad information that they feed to people, but most people aren’t aware of it,” he added.
