London — Search engine titan Google makes every attempt to keep you glued to its website and never leave Google again! The company on Friday announced that it is rolling out “Place Pages for Google Maps,” which are essentially Google-hosted Web elements that provides detailed information such as: businesses, points of interest, transit stations, landmarks, and cities.
The new feature called “Place Pages” enables users to get all of the information they are seeking on a restaurant, for example, in one place, instead of locating a service and then undertaking a separate search. Hitting the “More Info” button now displays a whole page aggregating all the info you could ever need, from photos and reviews to directions, and it would not just do it for business, but for any location in the world!
Clicking on these two options will produce an entire page of rich details such as photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.
Google unveiled Place Pages on its official blog, in which it said: “Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.”
“By saying every place, we really mean *every* place – there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.”
“If I’m visiting Sydney, I can visit the Place Pages of popular destinations like the Opera House, Aquarium, and Garden Palace to see photos, find nearby public transit, and even discover related maps users have created with landmarks in Australia,” Avni Shah, senior product manager for Google’s Place Pages team, wrote in a blog post. “For businesses, I can check out “More Details” to see where all the information is coming from or even edit to add my own information or reviews.”
The Google Maps Places Pages product also empowers you to include your own URL to a spot, (For instance, San Francisco is google.com/places/us/california/san-francisco-city). The idea behind it is to involve people to update their POIs and businesses on Google Maps by tempting them with better layout and a portal to call their own, and we are hoping it works.
Shah said the feature will benefit business owners because it will give consumers a one-stop place on the Web to view reviews, maps, and transit options. Each site will also have its own URL to make it easier to track and favorite certain places.
The move is a danger to established online businesses such as Yelp, which already provide a similar service.