Google: There Have To Be Yelps In The World, But…

Today during our Social Currency CrunchUp , Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management, took the stage. Given that the two companies seem to be at odds with one another recently (following a failed acquisition ), it was a little tense. Specifically, Google's strong moves into local with their new Places push seem to be going right at Yelp's core . Sure's it's potentially about more than just local venue reviews, but that's a huge part of it. And that's what Yelp is all about. Moreover, Google is using Yelp data to bulk up their Places offering . Yelp can't like that too much. In fact, we've heard they're particularly unhappy because they used to have a deal with Google for this data, but they pulled out of that deal a couple years ago. But Google decided to use Yelp's data anyway simply by crawling it. Yelp can't stop them from doing that unless they want to delist themselves from Google -- a move which could kill them.