Google Maps: Now Adding Reviews from News Sites, Hyperlocal Blogs and Other Review Sources

| Jan 18, 2010 | 0 comments

What’s New in Reviews at Google Maps:

With their newly implemented sentiment analysis, Google Maps is apparently now reaching across hyperlocal blogs, local portals and news sites and retrieving blog entries, general editorial reporting and even blog comments for inclusion as reviews on their Places Pages.

This change portends a dramatically changed review landscape where both the volume of reviews for some types of businesses will rise and the dynamics of reputation management will change. It could very well shift  the balance of power away from centralized review sites and could be one more impediment to any recovery of the IYP sites.

With the advent of Places, Google Maps started including more meaningful review snippets on the Places Page and recently they added the ability to parse reviews into finer categories for a better understanding of reviewer’s perspectives about that Place. It appears that this new sentiment analysis capability is now also being applied to general web content to both identify and categorize these new reviews.

Read the Rest at Blumenthals.

Filed Under: Google • Local Search • Technology

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Travis Wright

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Travis Wright is the Chief Marketing Officer for a Kansas City Marketing company, Advangel. He is a local search strategist. Crowdsourcerer. SEO Jedi. Brand Trafficker. Über Bullshittapotomus. Social Shaman. Pompous Windbag. Net Ninja. His Tweet Fu is Strong. Follow @teedubya for additional golden nuggets of awesome sauce. Find me on Google+