Google Retires ‘HotPot’ While Yelp Says Reviews Beat Ratings. Google is folding HotPot into Google Places, in an effort to clean up a bit of the confusion that is Google’s collection of LBS properties. There’s no substantive change; Google is just making HotPot a “feature” of Places. It’s also a reflection of the fact that Google now considers HotPot a success and is folding it permanently into Places. Google previously revealed that there were in excess of three million ratings on Google HotPot/Places. Independently VendAsta also confirmed to me that there had been a rapid rise in the number of ratings coming from Google. I asked Google where the name “HotPot” came from. I had missed the blog post explaining the genesis of the name: Hot pot, the dish, is about community. I also had a chat with Yelp today, which sought to make the point that there’s a difference between star ratings and in-depth reviews — in other words Google vs.
In a star-ratings environment most businesses wind up being 3.5 stars: “regression toward the mean.” What do you think? How Google may Manage Reputations for Reviewers and Raters. Do reviews of businesses and products at Google influence how well those might show up in Place searches or product searches? It’s possible that they may, and a bigger question might be how much weight might Google give to each review that it sees. An answer, in part, to that may depend upon a reputation score associated with the people leaving reviews.
People do go online in search of reviews and ratings for businesses and products, and the search engines are trying to provide that information when and where they think it might be useful. Starred ratings are also showing in Google’s Web search with Rich Snippets, and the presence of ratings may influence whether or not someone clicks through a snippet from Google’s search results. A recent change to how Google shows search results in Web search may mean that if Google thinks you are performing a search where local search results are appropriate, then Google may show those local results as if they were organic search listings. Google Places Gains New Ally in Review Battle with Yelp. How Yelp Crushed Citysearch & Yahoo Local … & Why Google Is Stealing Yelp’s Playbook. A fascinating study published last year compares the reviews and reviewers at three local business websites: Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo Local.
And, in explaining how Yelp overtook the other two, it also hints — in my opinion — at how Google is trying to beat Yelp by using Yelp’s own playbook. Citysearch and Yahoo Local were the two dominant websites for online business reviews early in the 2000s. Yelp has far surpassed both now and has the biggest review collection on the web; it reported passing 17 million reviews last month, and doubled its regular rate of reviews with about two million added just in the first quarter of this year.
Why has Yelp succeeded where the others have failed? Zhongmin Wang, an economics professor at Northeastern University, looks at that question in his study, Anonymity, Social Image, and the Competition for Volunteers: A Case Study of the Online Market for Reviews (PDF download, 320k). He says both Citysearch and Yahoo Local made the same mistake: No Anonymity. My Review Corpus is Bigger Than Your Review Corpus And Why It Matters.
Yelp has obviously always wanted the spot of top dog in the general review world, moving out of their niche in restaurants and large markets several years ago. Google recognized Yelp’s strong position and made a play for them in late 2009. Obviously Yelp felt that their independent position was defensible. At the time, Google’s review efforts were lagging and Yelp was expanding across many fronts. In their effort to buttress the public and market perception of themselves as the front runner in the general review world, Yelp has often touted both the quality and quantity of their review corpus. They proclaimed in March of 2010 of having reached 10 million reviews and again last December they stated that they would have 15 million reviews by the end of 2010.
Google on the other hand never would make a comment as to how many reviews that they had accumulated since rolling out reviews in 2007. But things started to change after the rollout of Hotpot. Why is this important?