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 i

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.