Mountain View, California — Relentlessly striving to snap at every new opportunities in the online arena, search engine titan Google on Tuesday expanded its Hotpot, a Yelp competitor that acts as its local recommendation engine and ratings/reviews system for places, has officially gone worldwide. And do not be surprised, Hotpot links will now also appear in Google’s web search results.
Google users who have adopted the company’s Hotpot service can now find ratings and recommendations on hotels, restaurants, mobile devices and other spots as part of their standard search results. If you are searching for local restaurants in Barcelona on Google.com, for example, and a Hotpot friend has rated a particular restaurant in that city, Google will display their recommendation in its search results.
Moreover, users will be able to view their friend’s name, photo, and what they had to say about a particular restaurant. For all recommendations, log into Google, click the “Places” link on the left-hand side of the page, and choose “Friends Only.”
You can now see opinions from your Google Hotpot friends in your regular search results. (Credit: Google)
On the official Google blog, Hotpot project manager Lior Ron writes, “Hotpot is really going places: to a Google search box near you and around the world.”
Ron also mentioned that Hotpot will now be available in 38 new languages, among them, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Korean.
Google’s integration of Hotpot into web search results is rather subtle at the start. Until yesterday, Hotpot was a separate Google service that you had to access on its own. Launched in November for Android devices, Hotpot is a social recommendation app that empowers you the ability to share reviews of different establishments with friends of your choosing, based on Google Places’ directory of 50 million locations around the world.
Furthermore, if you are looking for a local hotel, restaurant, supermarket, shopping mall, or store, your fellow Hotpot users can tell you which ones are worth checking out. And if you want to share your opinions of that terrific Mexican restaurant down the road, you can do that as well.
The move was inevitable, and it is now available in 38 languages, and it certainly makes search results more social. “Instantly seeing place recommendations based on your choice and those of your friends across more Google searches will make results more significant to you and maybe lead you to discover a new gem,” Google wrote in a blog post. “So far if you do not have Hotpot friends, you can invite them to contribute all the places they love with you by using the ‘Friends’ tab on google.com/hotpot.”
Hotpot is expanding globally as well, and the product has a seamless integration with Google Maps via the Web, Google Maps for Android, and the Google Places app for the iPhone.
Nevertheless, Google is more aggressively moving forward to deliver personalized recommendations. The review sites like Yelp, who are already critical of Google, are going to love this.
If you are not acquainted with Hotpot, launched late last year, this video pretty much sums it up: