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This is a straight up attack on yelp, targeting local commerce. Their goal is that instead of searching yelp for massage therapy, you search google maps. That s

by _lex 13y ago

This is a straight up attack on yelp, targeting local commerce. Their goal is that instead of searching yelp for massage therapy, you search google maps. That sort of query is extremely valuable (trust me - my company pays for it every day). It makes a lot of business sense - it's probably the most lucrative way to monetize maps, and get people to use google reviews more.

dreamdu5t 13y ago
Yelp built a community around top reviewers and incentives people to review. Google Places doesn't really offer incentives for people to review or to spend time reviewing.
- OGinparadise 13y ago
  Google has Search to promote their stuff, even if it's inferior. Put theirs on top, meaning other reviews are much harder to find (people click on top links). That's how many people installed Chrome for example
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    You really think Chrome when launched was an inferior browser? It had a radically simplified UI, secure multiprocess sandboxing, vastly faster Javascript engine, and continuously autoupdating system. It reignited the browser wars again, and I congratulate Firefox for upping their game, and now overall, if you look at browsers today (Chrome, Firefox, IE11) they are vastly more capable than the situation before when Chrome 1.0 was launched. Yes, Google marketed Chrome, but users love it, just like iPhone users love it regardless of the number of Apple billboards or commercials, because fundamentally, it is a good product. You think when Google Maps was launched their primary competitors (e.g. MapQuest) had anything comparable? Maps was one of the first, large scale, Web 2.0/AJAX applications. At the time, most other mapping products were still reloading an iframe or the whole page everytime you needed to change the map. Gmail was lightyears better in both performance, spam filtering, organization, and speed compared to other major WebMails at the time. The New Google Maps is a quantum leap over competitors like Bing Maps, even native iOS maps.
- saidajigumi 13y ago
  But what Google has clearly started to do here is an extension of classic Information Retrieval (IR) techniques also applied in its search products. About time. Basic IR intro, skip this paragraph if you know the drill: Basic text search can be thought of as "looking for your search terms in relevant documents" (ala TF-IDF[1]). More sophisticated search layers on various other metrics. Google famously employed its Page Rank algorithm[2] as one such example. Modern search engines with enough traffic can also use click streams themselves as a search metric: for the given search terms, which link(s) were actually clicked on? Back on point: What users click on and where they go (if the data is available) and how many times they go (again, if the data is available) are usable metrics, physical equivalents of click-stream traffic. Likewise, information from other sources about relatedness of locations can also be integrated. Think "semantic fisheye views." E.g. you clicked on a pub, and Google knows about other pubs and bars in the area. Or perhaps you clicked on a Yoga studio, which causes different location relationships to be (de-)emphasized. Google at very least can draw on their classic search data as well as the more structured location and business data they've been building for some time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Google can easily transform reviews into a simple social network feature. Something that becomes a byproduct of the ways that people use maps ordinarily. This is potentially quite huge, because reviews always have a problem of opt-in self-selection. If people start using maps to keep track of which restaurants they personally like the most then that gives a huge amount of implicit information for other people searching for restaurants. It's like the way pagerank works. It doesn't rely on explicit rankings, it relies on extracting implicit trust and authority information from the natural and organic ways that people link things on the web.
rallison 13y ago
And I wish Google well in this realm. Given yelp's somewhat shady practices, I welcome more competition (well, I would welcome the competition regardless, but especially in this case).
- JakeSc 13y ago
  > Given yelp's somewhat shady practices I remember reading about this a couple years ago. Is it still an issue? Can you point to any recent sources?
  - _lex 13y ago
    My company's currently the subject of sabotage on yelp, and it's having a pretty substantial effect. Now, I don't think that yelp itself is responsible, but they make it pretty easy to attack competitors if you've got no scruples. Check my hn username and email me if you want specifics.
snogglethorpe 13y ago
Seems like such a feature could help other sites (like yelp) too though: at least where I live, the "what stuff is at this location" feature of google maps shows not just Google reviews, but also has appropriate links into other review services (not yelp, as they don't seem to be a player here, but other very well-known restaurant/store review sites). This is very useful for the user, as there are often many more and better quality reviews on these popular sites.

by _lex 13y ago

dreamdu5t 13y ago

Yelp built a community around top reviewers and incentives people to review. Google Places doesn't really offer incentives for people to review or to spend time reviewing.

OGinparadise 13y ago
Google has Search to promote their stuff, even if it's inferior. Put theirs on top, meaning other reviews are much harder to find (people click on top links). That's how many people installed Chrome for example
- cromwellian 13y ago
  You really think Chrome when launched was an inferior browser? It had a radically simplified UI, secure multiprocess sandboxing, vastly faster Javascript engine, and continuously autoupdating system. It reignited the browser wars again, and I congratulate Firefox for upping their game, and now overall, if you look at browsers today (Chrome, Firefox, IE11) they are vastly more capable than the situation before when Chrome 1.0 was launched. Yes, Google marketed Chrome, but users love it, just like iPhone users love it regardless of the number of Apple billboards or commercials, because fundamentally, it is a good product. You think when Google Maps was launched their primary competitors (e.g. MapQuest) had anything comparable? Maps was one of the first, large scale, Web 2.0/AJAX applications. At the time, most other mapping products were still reloading an iframe or the whole page everytime you needed to change the map. Gmail was lightyears better in both performance, spam filtering, organization, and speed compared to other major WebMails at the time. The New Google Maps is a quantum leap over competitors like Bing Maps, even native iOS maps.
saidajigumi 13y ago
But what Google has clearly started to do here is an extension of classic Information Retrieval (IR) techniques also applied in its search products. About time. Basic IR intro, skip this paragraph if you know the drill: Basic text search can be thought of as "looking for your search terms in relevant documents" (ala TF-IDF[1]). More sophisticated search layers on various other metrics. Google famously employed its Page Rank algorithm[2] as one such example. Modern search engines with enough traffic can also use click streams themselves as a search metric: for the given search terms, which link(s) were actually clicked on? Back on point: What users click on and where they go (if the data is available) and how many times they go (again, if the data is available) are usable metrics, physical equivalents of click-stream traffic. Likewise, information from other sources about relatedness of locations can also be integrated. Think "semantic fisheye views." E.g. you clicked on a pub, and Google knows about other pubs and bars in the area. Or perhaps you clicked on a Yoga studio, which causes different location relationships to be (de-)emphasized. Google at very least can draw on their classic search data as well as the more structured location and business data they've been building for some time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Google can easily transform reviews into a simple social network feature. Something that becomes a byproduct of the ways that people use maps ordinarily. This is potentially quite huge, because reviews always have a problem of opt-in self-selection. If people start using maps to keep track of which restaurants they personally like the most then that gives a huge amount of implicit information for other people searching for restaurants. It's like the way pagerank works. It doesn't rely on explicit rankings, it relies on extracting implicit trust and authority information from the natural and organic ways that people link things on the web.

rallison 13y ago

And I wish Google well in this realm. Given yelp's somewhat shady practices, I welcome more competition (well, I would welcome the competition regardless, but especially in this case).

JakeSc 13y ago
> Given yelp's somewhat shady practices I remember reading about this a couple years ago. Is it still an issue? Can you point to any recent sources?
- _lex 13y ago
  My company's currently the subject of sabotage on yelp, and it's having a pretty substantial effect. Now, I don't think that yelp itself is responsible, but they make it pretty easy to attack competitors if you've got no scruples. Check my hn username and email me if you want specifics.

snogglethorpe 13y ago

Seems like such a feature could help other sites (like yelp) too though: at least where I live, the "what stuff is at this location" feature of google maps shows not just Google reviews, but also has appropriate links into other review services (not yelp, as they don't seem to be a player here, but other very well-known restaurant/store review sites). This is very useful for the user, as there are often many more and better quality reviews on these popular sites.