Yelp Walks Away From Google
Posted by Peter Inthirakoth in acquisition, Google, Knol, Orkut, Social networking, Yelp
From CNET News
It was reported a few days ago that Google was in talks to acquire Yelp for $500 million dollars. It would seem that the sum was not sufficient enough to entice Yelp's executives to complete the deal.
Yelp is a social networking site that provides local business searches as well as ratings and reviews from the community. There was the perception from Yelp's user base that an acquisition by Google would degrade the site. Previous social network acquisitions by Google have fizzled out according to the article. Orkut (once popular in Brazil) was decimated by the rise of Facebook and Knol has failed to make any inroads into Wikipedia's popularity despite having the massive resources of Google at hand. Youtube lacks a significant coherent community that substantively interacts--it is more of a bulletin board than a social network at this point.
There are no other known interested parties at this point, so it would seem that Yelp's executives were interested in protecting their company and their work. The article provides some conjecture that the executives didn't believe that Google would be able to provide value to the relationship through an acquisition. Maybe Google can't do it all.