good find. I wonder if they are testing a more dynamic sentiment analysis and generating options based on existing sentiments… I don’t have an Android to test if it is there or not… certainly not on the desktop.

Bernardo ? – Dec 2, 2010
A bit to pricie for what it is, but nice.
Liked: Food, Atmosphere, Value, Portions, Presentation

As far as I know you can only rate Food, Service, Atmosphere and Value from Hotpot.

Hotpot, and its features, do not really need to exist in a standalone way to be successful… when paired with reviews the ratings (whether from a quickie star on a mobile device or a fuller review in Hotpot itself) will create a lot of additional signals that will be valuable to Google.

I think it is necessary to evaluate the whole of the Google review system when comparing it to Yelp. Yelp may always be the goto site in urban foodie markets where people talk about foie gras as the end all be all… but the world is a big place with lots of non restaurant establishments and businesses not in SF or NYC.

I wonder whether Google’s backfill (aggregate), fill (review) and over fill (ratings) might not be the most successful over time in industry and locales that by their nature are going to be generally lightly reviewed. And in those industries and locales that are heavily reviewed Google shows the scraped data… in the end they may not care as much about the content of reviews as the quantity and sentiment which they get regardless.

More than 60 ratings (without reviews) were created on Nov. 16 and another 28 or so on Nov. 17. That’s an amazingly high level of activity for one establishment.

It appears the raters on those days also rated A LOT of other businesses (mostly restaurants) on the 16th, too… and most don’t look to have rated any other businesses since that day.

Was there a push at G to get employees to use Hotpot when it was announced? Probably so. Will the Googlers (and others) continue to use it in their daily dealings with local businesses? Only then will Hotpot rival a service like Yelp.

BTW, I did get a little chuckle when seeing one of Carter’s maps edits marked ‘denied’. Guess it even happens to the best of us.

But as you know, I love tips and tidbits. You have been kind enough to email me a few ( mike at blumenthals.com) yourself…. this job of watching Places is much, much easier and a lot more fun when there are many hands on the task.

@Lior
Well, next time you fly me to the Googleplex, perhaps we can eat there on the expense account. I am sure that it is good. You are not alone, 20 others noted it as best ever. Just promise me that you won’t proclaim that the foie gras is “to die for”. What’s Carter’s story?

Sorry about the continual errors on the name. I spelled it correctly 8 out of 9 times… lets see that’s a 4.5 star rating…

I find it a very difficult name to proof read. Perhaps Google needs to create a self correcting plug in for WordPress.

I think its your turn for research.

@Heather
Yes it does have impact and yes it will be gamed and as you point out, the visual impact is likely to be the biggest fallout/outcome

@Ted
Whether it becomes noise or not, depends on whether it is used for recommendations or ranking. The liklihood is that if it is just used for ranking then it will be noise and it won’t be too many years either…. at which point they will need to write a new algo to deprecate their value.

Oh, and I almost forgot… you wanted to know how I found so much interesting stuff…. Its because I spend way too much time looking at Places! I was trying to find examples of business responses to bad reviews and I cam across this… the names literally jumped off the page at me