Yelp.com has reportedly turned down an offer from Google for over $500million (everybody says “half a billion dollars!!!” to make it sound bigger). Hmmm.
If you haven’t heard of Yelp, seriously, what rock are you living under? Arguably the best place on the net to find reviews of restaurants, businesses, etc. It’s the place to go look before you take that special someone to a new restaurant, or if you are looking for a local place to hit up for dinner.
So over the last week or so, the rumor-mill has been churning away saying that Google was in talks to acquire Yelp. This would be a pretty symbiotic relationship, don’t you think? Yelp is a very specific search engine for reviews on places, and google is a very general search engine on everything. They could easily refer search results to each other.
But Yelp.com walked away from the table after all but having the deal done. What’s up? Is something bigger on the horizon for Yelp? Do they think they can get more from somebody else? Really the only other group with tons of cash hidden under the mattress is Apple and I can’t see right away why they would be interested.