Along with the recent rollout of Hotpot, Google has added new review related features to the Places Page. The first, available on restaurants and hotels (perhap more but not on every type of business) allows you to summarize sentiment about the location:
Restaurant:
Hotel:
The ability to quickly and easily add sentiment will further build out Google’s data in the service industries. As users fill out more reviews, friends make more recomendations Google will use this additional data to refine and improve those recommendations.
On all Places Pages your rating is now visible and with hotels Google has now also added the ability to book your hotel right from the Places Page:
This feature facilitates the process of getting bookings and removes friction from it. It also provides additional advertising inventory for Google from hotel booking services. The feature is not totally mercenary as it also offers up the hotel site for booking and gives the hotel a 1 in 4 chance of not having to give money to Priceline et al while still getting a sale.
Mike -
How is the booking data being gathered? Is this something the hotel owner will be filling out on a weekly basis…something from a booking company…something else?
Comment by MiriamEllis (640 comments) — November 16, 2010 @ 4:26 pm
Do you know if they are intending to expand sentiment support beyond these 2 industries? Are they going to support micro-formatted sentiment?
Comment by Ted Paff (67 comments) — November 16, 2010 @ 4:26 pm
Me again, Mike.
I’m not able to see either of these features yet, locally. I’m looking for them. One thing I am noticing that looks new to me:
If I am signed into Google, and I visit a Place Page, in the Google Reviews section, I see a link that says: Been here? Rate and Review.
If I click this link, the ability to review opens automatically within the page. Unless I’m mistaken, that is quite new.
Comment by MiriamEllis (640 comments) — November 16, 2010 @ 4:35 pm
Well, okay, I see the sentiment box in San Francisco, but not in the smaller towns. Looks like the rollout is partial.
Comment by MiriamEllis (640 comments) — November 16, 2010 @ 4:38 pm
@Miriam
This feature, recently expanded to the Places Page, was rolled out for testing in March and expanded in July. At the time Google noted: While we’re experimenting with this feature, we’re currently working with a limited number of advertisers. So I don’t really know how it works.
Yes, the “Been here? Rate and review” is new as is the “Your rating” assignation.
btw I am seeing the sentiment in small towns around here…
@Ted
As far as I know so far this is an effort to just collect more data about certain Places. It makes perfect sense that the they would want to gather sentiment data in a more structured way but I have heard nothing along those lines.
Comment by Mike Blumenthal (2008 comments) — November 16, 2010 @ 4:56 pm
I love this feature – I hope (like Yelp… in some ways) that they don’t let it get too abused.
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This is a great tool for hotels from Google but every hotel needs to be aware of their profile and the comments that people leave them. Competitors can easily go in there and spam it with bad reviews.
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