Google is also serving up the app with Hotpot, its new local recommendation service. When you sign in with a Google identity (like a Gmail username and password), you can rate and review places. When you click on aplace, it shows you the adress, cumulative rating, with buttons to see it on a map, get directions, or make a call. It also shows excerpts of reviews from around the web like on Yelp or Insiderpages, and below that are the native Google reviews.

Currently, Google Places does not have a lot of great quality reviews written by Google users themselves. Therefore, Google built the product on the backs of reviews from other sites on the Web. But Google wants to build up its own corpus of reviews, and with apps like this it is going straight to consumers to get them to rate and review places around where they live, work, and travel.

Google is pushing Google Places on its main search page, and now it is attacking from the mobile flank. The more native ratings and reviews Google Places can gather, the more it becomes a direct competitor to the Yelps and Citysearches of the world it currently indexes to fill in the details on its Place pages. Note that Yelp and Citysearch have competing iPhone apps as well. Which one are you going to use?

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Authors: Erick Schonfeld

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