Mountain View, California — In an attempt to claim exclusivity for its Places pages, search engine giant Google Inc has stripped snippets of reviews from sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and others from Google Places local search product, in favor of all-Google content, a move that could boost the company’s argument that it does not violate antitrust laws.
The Web titan made the move announced late last week on its official blog, after months of complaints from sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, which claimed their content was being republished without compensation, besides the disclosure of a U.S. antitrust investigation last month.
Google in its announcement mentioned that it is discarding ratings and snippets from third-party reviews from its Google Places pages, indicating that bits of information from services like Yelp and TripAdvisor will no longer get featured screen real estate in Google’s location-based listings.
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The Choice To Drop Outside Reviews:
There is quite a long history to this move. Google in April 2010 retooled its Local Business Center search service, which lists millions of businesses as Google Places. The search engine company also commenced updating its overall look to coincide with the launch of Google+, from Maps, to Gmail, to Calendar.
“Based on careful though about the future course of Place pages, and response we have heard over the past few months, review snippets from other Web sources have now been removed from Place pages,” Avni Shah, director of product management at Google, wrote in a Google blog post describing the move.
“Rating and review counts reflect only those that have been written by fellow Google users, and as part of our continued commitment to helping you find what you want on the Web, we are continuing to provide links to other review sites so you can get a comprehensive view of locations across the globe,” Shah wrote on the blog post.
Apparently, Google’s removal of the outside reviews seems like a response to the antitrust concerns. According to FT.com, “Google’s change in practice came little more than a week after Dana Wagner, its legal director, came under attack about the practice from opponents at a conference of US state attorneys-general.”
The scrapping of third-party review snippets came on the heels of a Federal antitrust investigation looking into Google’s business practices. In Europe, Google is facing complaints from the likes of Citysearch, Yelp, and TripAdvisor that Google is exploiting their customer reviews in order to add value to its Google Places service.
Meanwhile, the federal scrutiny concerns whether Google, which commands the U.S. and worldwide markets for search engine advertising, abuses its market power by favoring its own services over those of rivals in online searches and through other practices.
However, the blog post did not mention of the investigation.
Interesting, though, is a further statement from Google: The company plans on “Integrating some of the great information that has been buried on Place pages into your web search experience across all Google platforms.” Google will, however, continue to provide links to Yelp, CitySearch and other third-party review sites.
Additionally, to accelerate recommendation sharing, Google added a Write a review button to the top of the Place page to encourage users to comment about restaurants, museums and other businesses they have visited.
In the meantime, Shah promised Google will bring users more personalized results in local search; consolidate Place pages in users’ search across all Google platforms; and create more ways for users to rate, discover and share places on any device.
Nonetheless, the search engine giant is opting to use the rating and reviews its own Honeypot recommendation engine has culled from users, which could one day lend more credence to the notion that it favors its own services. Google, of course, built the recommendation engine so it would not have to rely on third-party reviews.