Google 'Places' Drops Outside Customer Reviews

(Reuters) - Google Inc has removed excerpts of customer reviews from sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor from Google Places, its competing online service aimed at helping consumers search for local businesses.

The move, announced in Google's official blog on Thursday, follows the disclosure of a U.S. antitrust investigation last month.

The federal probe concerns whether Google, which dominates U.S. and global markets for search engine advertising, abuses its market power by favouring its own services over those of rivals in online searches and through other practices.

The blog post made no mention of the investigation.

"Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we've heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages," Avni Shah, Google's director of product management, said in the blog post.

Google said it added a function for Google users to write their own reviews at the top of its Place web pages.

It said the search pages' rating and review counts would only include reviews written by Google users, although the company would continue to list links to other review sites.

Google's "Places" offerings of local ratings and reviews, originally called Hotpot, were introduced last fall.

(Reporting by Julie Ingwersen)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Comments

[apathyman]

01:34 PM on 07/25/2011

Remember Google, you promised not to be evil

[ewj1]

02:05 PM on 07/25/2011

Yep they promised, it was all a PR stunt.Google's been evil for a while now.

[roc-o-rama]

03:53 PM on 07/25/2011

I agree, It would appear that when you're stock is trading at above $600 per share, you tend to forget your promises. It's all about money and staying ahead of your competition, so what if you sh*T on the little guys as long as you stay in a dominant position ahead of your competitors. As a software developer I find there to be a lot of good in Google for my work but it doesn't mean I always agree with their practices.

While I was watching True Blood last night on HBO there was a scene where it was addressing controlling factions on the human race over history such as the catholic church of the past and then it mentioned that the controlling factions of today are Google and Fox News, I laughed but there was a certain plausibility to that comment and that made me stop laughing.

[xdrfirefly]

11:53 AM on 07/25/2011

wait, now you can only read the reviews "google reviews" this is silly. The best was how I had all the tripadvisor, B&B, and other reviews nicely under my places tab... grr google, another stupid thing you do!

[cabrobst]

11:08 AM on 07/25/2011

Google is a monopoly.

[hungrypilot]

08:55 AM on 07/25/2011

Does that mean that the reviews of business on Google Maps will also be removed? It's going to hurt these businesses more than Google claims it will help them.