San Francisco — Last year, search engine behemoth Google fruitlessly ventured to buy Yelp, the local business rating and review site, but since then continued its recent trend of iOS app releases on Wednesday by introducing Google Places and Hotpot for iPhone and iPod touch.
If you are a Google Maps enthusiast, and you use apps like Yelp to help you find good restaurants, bars, etc., then you will be happy to know that Google, on Wednesday unleashed an iPhone app for Google Places and Hotpot, adding to the Android app it has offered since November, and the updated place search pages online that it debuted in October.
The app is intended to help you discover new places. It utilizes GPS to automatically detect your surroundings and closest locations. The app employs Hotpot, Google’s new personalized recommendation engine, to provide the best results.
“Places with Hotpot not only helps you find places near where you are, it gives you the best places to go for you by personalizing your search results,” Greg Blevins, a software engineer for Google Hotpot, wrote in a company blog post.
is an app for unearthing new places around you, rating your experiences, and sharing it all with friends. It looks like Google tore its place discovery feature out of Google Maps and sprinkled in some social elements in order to take on the likes of Yelp, Gowalla, Foursquare, and others.
Google Places adds a Yelp element in there by allowing you to rate your experience. People can adopt the location-based app to search for businesses like restaurants, bars and gas stations nearby. They can acquire information about restaurants, call them or get directions, and read reviews from a variety of services, including Yelp, Citysearch, Zagat, OpenTable and Google’s own Hotpot.
Currently there are not yet many Hotpot reviews. The app is dependent on users reviewing and rating each place to build a larger network. However, Google is trying to change that by encouraging Google users to write them, starting with a citywide effort in Portland, Ore. Google has been giving restaurants things like coasters and fortune cookies that encourage customers to review the business, and hanging signs around town, like one in the Portland airport that says: “This is your captain speaking. Start rating.” Many people may continue to use Yelp until Places’ review database grows more.
“It can be pretty rewarding to discover a new place you dote on, but we also realize that there are some experiences you just cannot wait to share,” says Greg Blevins, a software engineer with Google’s Hotpot team. “So Places makes it super simple to rate a place with your iPhone while you are there. Just fire up the app and hit “Rate now.” It will use your location to guess your current place and let you post a Hotpot review right from your phone. But it is not just about getting to say what you think — the more you rate places, the more you are sharing about your tastes and the more we can give you personally tailored recommendations.”
Google’s Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who was recently promoted to manage its local business, said it differed from other offerings because people can promptly rate many places without writing long reviews, and because it offers personalized recommendations. Those are based on a user’s tastes, gleaned from previous ratings, and from what their friends have liked.
“I think that when you look at our overall suite of services, especially around our advertising, we already have some things that are like this,” she said in an interview with Media Beat. “We have things like coupons and offer extension ads that allow merchants to basically make offers to our users. So we are looking at how we can take that technology and put it to use, especially in the location space.”
These endorsement take Google one step closer to offering search results before people have even performed a search — something Ms. Mayer has talked about in the past as a promise of mobile. “Hotpot is different because it is actually recommending places — you have not tried this place or rated it, but it thinks you will like it,” Ms. Mayer said.
Google Places features nine icon slots that you can customize to your most-used/favorite categories, for instance “restaurants,” “ATMs,” “gas stations,” “attractions,” etc. When you click on a category, nearby places complete with Place Page info will appear, including ratings and reviews. Google urges users to swap in their favorite types of destinations to make it easier to find the right spot while on-the-go.
Like the rest of Google’s consumer products, Google Places is free. It requires an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or later. The app can be found by searching for s in Apple’s App Store or visiting this link. It is available for all iOS devices in English for now. More languages will come later.
Google mentions that you can anticipate more features and improvements to roll out soon. It would not be surprising to see some deals-type things make an appearance.