Over the months this feature has become very popular and is now getting over 1 million ratings per month. Part of this popularity is due to the fact that the ratings and reviews of friends definitely carry more weight than the reviews given by strangers or professionals.

Google has also added an app on the iPhone and on Android to integrate the feature with Google Maps and Google.com. This feature is currently available in 47 different languages. Users can also share their ratings and reviews on twitter.

Thanks to this growing popularity, Google Hotpot is now being rolled into Google Places and will no longer be known as Google Hotpot. This change is being made to help users to find and review the over 50 million places which are already on Google Places.

Google will also be adding more features to Google Places, in due course of time in order to increase and improve the interactiveness of the site.

Google, Groupon and LivingSocial now include user reviews on their sites. These sites compete directly with Yelp, which is essentially a local business guide built on user reviews.

Details about the Yelp’s progress and strategies were discussed by the company’s CFO, Herman Vlado, during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference in San Francisco, reports Ben Parr from Mashable. He mentioned that they grew from 39 million visitors to the site in November 2010 to 45 million visitors in January this year. They also had 15 million reviews at the end of 2010, and 16 million in January.

Over 6 million user reviews were posted on Yelp in 2010. They expect this number to grow to 9 million this year.

While restaurant reviews were the mainstay of their business in the past,  they now include shopping reviews for all kinds of products and across all budget categories. As of now restaurant reviews continue to be an important part, generating 25% of the business, shopping reviews have become equally important and generate another 25% of the business. Other important sectors of the business are local entertainment, services and health and beauty, each of which contributes 10%.

Local subscriptions account for the major part of Yelp’s revenue. Each business pays them between $300 to $1,000 per month. Advertising and daily deals sectors have also become strong revenue generators. Their main competitors, Google focus solely on raising revenues through advertising. Others such as Groupon, Facebook and Foursquare focus more on earning revenue by providing deals.

Vlado, Yelp’s CFO, denied that the changes that had recently been incorporated into Google Places had had any significant impact on Yelp. It is, however, possible that the local sales divisions of Google, Groupon and LivingSocial may give Yelp a run for its money in future as they continue to solidify their respective positions in the reviews market.

This new service has features that will help businesses that have a physical venue such as a store or restaurant, as well those who do not have a physical venue, but offer a service such as a TV channel, a university or an upcoming movie release.

Businesses with a physical venue, who wish to avail of this facility, will be required to follow a three-step process. They will first have to claim their business location. They then create a special for their clients who would check in to the location through Foursquare. Lastly, they would have to analyse the data they receive through the campaign to further improve their business.

Foursquare business page for AccuraCast

A Foursquare special can be any kind of discount or other inducement for users to check in via Foursquare when visiting the venue. New and regular customers can be lured and rewarded with different specials. This way, the business is not only exposed to the users, but also to all their friends and contacts on the network.

Above and beyond specials offered by the business, users can also earn badges and points from Foursquare, which get displayed on their profile.

Businesses that do not have a physical venue or do not host customers at their offices can also create a page on Foursquare. This page will have the logo and other details about the business. It will also be linked to other social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Users accessing these pages will be rewarded with badges from the business.

Foursquare brand page for Zagat

The Business Pages for brands are not yet open to the general public on a self-serve basis. Interested businesses will have to fill out and submit a form to Foursquare after which the page will be created. Foursquare will also provide these businesses with access to their Venue Stats dashboard, so that they can analyse the results of their campaigns.

Start here to claim your business page on Foursquare

Hotpot allows users to give personalised reviews and recommendations for various venues listed on Google Places. The users’ friends can then view the reviews and also share their own opinions about those Places.

Places reviewed on Google Hotpot

Based on the ratings and reviews that a user and his friends give, Hotpot will recommend other places, which they expect the user to be interested in.

Google Hotpot has not yet been integrated with other Google services such as Gmail, Buzz or the social friends list, so users not only have to create a separate profile for themselves, they also have to re-enter their list of friends. Moreover, each friend has to be added separately, as there is no option to enter all the friends together in one go. Each friend also needs to reconfirm that he or she is willing to be on the friend list of that user.

The reviews that users or their friends add on Hotpot are accessible to the public. However, the user has the option to use a different name or photo on this profile, so as to remain anonymous.

Hotpot can be accessed by clicking on the ratings in any Google Places listing. Once users finalise their profile and friend list, they can put up reviews about several places in their locality. The list of places in that area is automatically provided by Hotpot. After a user has rated 5 places from the list, a new list is automatically shown. The more places a user reviews, the easier it is for Hotpot to suggest other places that the user may like.

Hotpot is also integrated with other Google searches, so when users click on Places they will also see reviews from other sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon.

The Hotpot service can be accessed on mobile handsets through Google Mobile Apps. It is currently available only on Android phones. This mobile service is especially useful for someone who is in unfamiliar territory, as they can see reviews from friends who have been there and select a place that their friends have recommended.

Google’s recent drive to spruce up their local business service seems to be finally delivering on their predictions of search evolving into a more personalised, localised and social experience.

Facebook launched Places in August this year. The  service paved the way for Deals by allowing users to find out if their friends were in the same locality as themselves.
Deals, is a sort-of extension of Places. Now, when a user signs in to Facebook, the local businesses in that area will be able to inform the user of some of the special deals that they are offering to their clients. Users can then also inform their friends about these deals.

In order to find these deals, the user has to touch Places and then check in on touch.facebook.com or via the latest version of Facebook for iPhone. Local businesses that are offering deals will be indicated with a yellow icon by the side. The user can then “touch” the place and check in to claim the deal by showing the phone at the concerned outlet.

Deals can be offered in different forms:

• Individual deals – where a discount or free merchandise is available
• Friend deals – which a user has to claim along with a friend
• Loyalty deals – for being a regular customer
• Charity deals – where the business will donate to a specific cause when the user checks in.

Facebook has already tied-up with over 20 retail chains  and they expect to host about 20,000 deals in the near future.

The world’s largest social network is no stranger to borrowing other peoples’ ideas and incorporating them into their own service. They’ve been accused of blatantly copying Twitter with their News Feed feature. Now, the new services are being likened to very similar offerings from Foursquare, Gowalla and Groupon.

These new Place Search results will be shown automatically when Google is able to gauge that a local search is being carried out. If that does not happen the user can use the ‘Places’ link in the left hand panel of the search results page.

Place Search groups together search results around a given location. The results are marked with red pins on a map in the right-hand column, where traditionally the 4th-6th sponsored links were placed. The listings are also accompanied by a snippet that can include a 2-line description, the business logo, address, phone number, ratings stars and links to reviews and the official Place Page.

Google Web search with Place listings

Certain search queries deliver a results page that contains a number of Place listings followed by just three organic search results. Others follow the older format of a map with up to 10 local listings followed by the usual 10 organic search results.

The update will show users between 30 to 40 links on a single page, saving time for the user but making the search results page busier and perhaps full of too many options and too many different logos and colours fighting for attention. This is quite a stark contrast to the early days of Google when simplicity was key to success.

Google also rolled out an ad service that will help small and medium sized businesses in particular. The new ad service, called ‘Boost’, allows businesses to place local business ads and show up when users conduct local searches in their specific business category. Place Search and Boost work well in conjunction with each other to help users as well as advertisers.

It has been estimated that over 20% of searches on Google are related to location. It makes sense for Google to pay attention to this corner of its market and to improve services there. What is surprising, though, is that rather than introducing business logos, images and videos in the sponsored links, they’ve chosen to draw attention back to organic search results and even pushed sponsored links below the fold on the right-hand side of the page.

The service which was launched in March 2009, took more than 1 year to reach 1 million users. The next million came in, just 3 months later and the third million was reached just one and a half months after that.

While it was initially assumed that location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla would receive stiff competition from the launch of Facebook Places, that does not seem to have happened as yet. In fact, co-founder Dennis Crowley said that foursquare received that largest number of sign in one day, the very day after Facebook Places was launched. He also says that Foursquare is receiving about 18,000 new users per day.

Other location based services such as My Town and Loopt have already amassed over 3 million users before Foursquare, but one of the main attractions for users to sign up with Foursquare seems to be their practice of rewarding users with badges and points.

However if they hope to compete successfully with the 500 million users of Facebook in the long run, they will have to diversify and improve their services.

They have recently managed to raise $20 million in funding, which they will use to employ more staff and also to get new premises and spread to San Francisco.

Users will now be able to send and receive information about their present whereabouts to and from their friends. The service is unashamedly similar to Foursquare.

When a user visits a particular location of interest, the “Check in” option can be used on the Facebook Places page via a mobile browser, just as one would on Foursquare. This way all the user’s friends will get notified about the user’s current whereabouts in real-time.

Easy Local Socialising

The ease of localised networking via Facebook will be much greater than that of Foursquare, simply due to Facebook’s popularity. Users will also be able to see if any of their friends happen to be in the same location.

In order to use Facebook Places, users will have to first download the latest version of the Facebook app on iPhones or navigate to Places on touch.facebook.com on a mobile browser that supports HTML 5 and geolocation.

Clicking on the “Check in” button displays a list of the places of interest around a user’s current location. The user can then select the appropriate one. If a particular location is not already available in the list, it can be searched for or just added to the list.

Once a user is checked in, all of the user’s friends will be be notified about the location via the News Feed. It will also show up as part of ‘Recent activity’ on that page.

Apart from checking oneself in, a user can also tag the friends who happen to be present in that location. A section called “People here now” will also show other friends who are checked in there for a short period of time.

Privacy of Facebook Places

Users will have the option of whether or not to be included in that section. Users who do not want to be part of that list can be excluded by adjusting the appropriate privacy controls. Similarly, tagging a friend will also be possible only if the friend has allowed it.

The usual privacy settings will remain functional unless the user has sets the mode to “Everyone”, in which case that user’s whereabouts would become public knowledge.

A tagged status update will appear for users who don’t want to be tagged. Users can remove themselves from Places after being checked in or tagged. They can also discontinue the ability for their friends to check them.

Information can also be shared with third-party applications, provided the application has received Facebook permissions to do so.

Using the local section on m.bing.com users can now find a lot of information that they might need when they are on the go.

Bing provides users a list of suggestions for their local area. The suggestions are based on popularity and also vary according to the time of day. For instance, if a user is conducting a search in the morning hours, the suggestions will give priority to restaurants that offer breakfast and coffee shops. On the other hand, in the evening hours, places such as pubs and nightclubs will be ranked higher.

These results are based on either GPS-determined location of the handset or via mobile phone location triangulation. Users can also the select the radius within which they want to conduct the local search. In areas that are crowded or heavily congested, users can use a smaller radius and in open areas they can use a larger radius.

The listings offered on Bing mobile can also be displayed on a single map for convenience.

To make use of the local suggestion facility, users must click the ‘Local’ link on the Bing Mobile homepage. They will then be presented with a list of nearby places grouped under various categories such as restaurants, schools, shopping malls and theatres.

After selecting the appropriate options the user can save them in the Favourites column. Thereafter the user can just clicks “What’s nearby” and find a list of places of interest in a given radius.

These listings can then be seen on a map, and they can even be forwarded to friends via email, so that users can easily discuss their options and decide where they wish to go.

Register local listings on Bing For Business

Bing might not be anywhere near the top choice for UK searchers, but it is believed to have the potential to reach 30 million users in the U.K. through the search boxes available on various Microsoft properties such as Internet Explorer, MSN and Windows Live.

Businesses that register with Bing for Business in order to establish a local presence on Bing Maps could be more visible to consumers.

While Microsoft promotes Bing’s local service as a simple 3-step process for businesses wishing to increase their visibility on the search engine, the reality is not quite as simple.

First, business owners or representative must add their business details to Bing’s local listings. Rather than handling the process in-house, Bing U.K. has outsourced it to a company called 118information. The process breaks down here itself for many businesses.

Once the user has verified that the business is not alreay listed on 118information, a new listing can be submited via a form that requires the business details as well as details about a “Senior Decision Maker”.

What’s worse, the form does not even mention a privacy policy, link to one or give users the option to opt out of being spammed by Microsoft’s selected partner and their partners!

Anyone with experience dealing with telemarketers will know that when someone asks for a “senior decision maker”, they are asking for permission to spam, online, offline and over the telephone!

Once a business has been verified, its information will be displayed on various Microsoft services including Instant Answers, Local Search and Maps.

The second and third steps that Microsoft recommend are registering the business website with Bing investing in pay per click advertising to highlight their products and service.

If Microsoft hopes to catch up with Google Maps or even local search services such as Yelp and FourSquare, they will definitely need to improve they way they go about collecting data to being with, in order to have a comprehensive set of listings, which users can then trust to deliver the results they need.

The service has already been doing well, with over 4 million businesses having connected to it and creating Place Pages. It provides information to users about more than 50 million places worldwide ranging from restaurants and bars to parks and museums.

Google Places will now offer some additional features such as the area in which the service provider operates.

Businesses will also be able to highlight their listings with a little yellow tag on Google.com and Google Maps for just $25 a month. The facility is already available in certain cities like Houston and San Jose and is now being introduced in Austin, Atlanta and Washington D.C. It will also be introduced in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco shortly.

While it is already possible to upload photos on the site, Google will now offer a free photo shoot of the interiors of the business premises in certain cities.

Google will also provide customised QR codes to businesses through Google Places. Late last year, Google introduced a feature called ‘Favorite Places’, which allowed over 100,000 businesses to feature a window decal saying “We’re a favourite place on Google”, alongside a QR code linking to the Place Page for the business. Google will push another round of this service and will provide window decals to 50,000 more businesses in the U.S.A.

Many have seen these new services from Google to be in direct response to Yelp declining their acquisition offer. Popularising the Google Places service via the businesses and driving more users to interact with and review these listings will definitely give Google the ammunition it needs to stop Yelp’s growth into their territory.

The information was given to The New York Times by unnamed sources who have not yet been authorised to talk about the upcoming feature.

It is likely that Facebook may announce this feature at f8, their yearly developer conference, which is due to be held next month.

One of the reasons why rumours about this feature sound more credible could be the fact that Facebook changed their privacy policy last November. The policy now says, “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

However, in anticipation of protests by the advocates of user privacy, Facebook also said, “If we offer a service that supports this type of local sharing, we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

It is believed that Facebook has been working on this location sharing feature for almost a year now. However, when questioned about the service, official spokeswoman, Meredith Chin said, “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now.”

The location sharing feature will supposedly be offered directly by Facebook to its users and will also have a set of software tools for developers to offer location-based services.

The fact that 50% of Facebook users log in at least once a day and 100 million users (25%) use their mobile phones to do so, makes location sharing an important feature for Facebook.

While this feature will give competition to smaller location-based networks like Foursquare and Loopt, it is more likely to compete with Google for a share of the revenue from the small business local advertising sector.

It now turns out that the speculations were true. Peter Burrows at BusinessWeek reported that Microsoft had made Yelp an offer of over $700 million, while the original offer they had received from Google had been in the region of $550 million.

To everyone’s surprise, Yelp, which hosts reviews of local businesses, has gone ahead and rejected the offer from Microsoft as well!

Instead, the company has accepted an investment of $100 million from Elevation Partners, which values the company at just $475 million.

On being questioned about this decision, Yelp CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman told Peter Burrows, “Yelp has the chance to become one of the great internet brands… That for me is the chance of a lifetime.”

Critics and supporters are shocked at the decision. Most believe that this was a colossal mistake, and while Yelp might be doing well right now, they are more than likely at the pinnacle of their success.

Google and Microsoft could very easily build such technology and both are sitting on enough cash to be able to even pay real users to post reviews on their services instead of Yelp.

Only time will tell, though, whether Stoppelman’s hopes will come true and the risk he has taken will be worth it or not.

Yelp, which was founded in 2004 by two former employees of PayPal, is a local review website that allows users to read or write reviews about various businesses. Their revenues in 2009 will be around $30 million and are expected to touch $50 million in 2010.

comScore has estimated that Yelp receive nearly 9 million unique monthly visitors, though the company claims that they get close to 25 million unique visitors per month.

Google has been developing its own local business directory, with Place Pages and Google Maps, wanted to have Yelp on their side, and were believed to have offered them around $550 million plus earnouts to do so.

Talks were believed to be at a very advanced stage and the deal looked almost certain to go through. But, almost at the last minute, something made CEO Jeremy Stoppleman change his mind, and he has turned down Google’s offer.

It is not yet known what influenced this turn around, but speculations are rife that some other big company, possibly Apple or Microsoft, made a counter offer or a strategic deal with Yelp, which has caused this sudden change of heart.

It is believed that they will use Google Maps and Street View in a manner similar to what they are already offering in Australia since a few months ago. Early reports show that the Australian real estate search service is getting a good response. Estate agents list the sites available to them, along with all details for free, and Google provides a picture of the front of the property via Street View.

If Google does launch a similar service in the U.K. they could earn a lot of revenue from the advertising potential that this service would generate.

Spokespersons from various agencies who have heard of this service, have said that this move could be interesting and it is likely to affect other property listing sites, especially if Google offers this service for free.

It is also likely that the newspaper industry may suffer further losses as a result of such a service. The newspaper industry is already suffering from loss of advertising in their real estate classified section, due a combination of a fall in the real estate market and due to similar services being offered on other websites.

Google has so far refrained from making any comment on the subject.

Google Real Estate Search Australia

Update:

This service is now live in the UK, as of 16 June 2010.

The study was conducted through an online questionnaire, answered by 4,000 users and through a behavioral study across 2 million users.

The results show that the number of people depending on digital sources for local sources is increasing along with the number of digital sources available.

Thus search engines have now become the primary source of local information, while the print media seems to be declining.

The number of local business searchers who own print directories has gone down from 89% in 2008 to 84% in 2009. The use of Internet Yellow Pages however has been increasing steadily.

While the online media is obviously prospering, the offline media also continues to hold a fairly steady following especially among users over 45 years of age. 40% of this section of users, uses the print directories, while only 24% of them use search engines by choice.

Social media and mobile searches are also growing sources of local business information and thought hey account for only 1% and 3% of market share respectively, they are definitely on the upswing and marketers would do well to keep this in mind.

Not surprisingly, Google Maps has improved their market share of local search from 15% in the fourth quarter of 2008 to 24% in the second quarter of 2009.

The usage of consumer ratings and reviews has gone up from 22% in 2008 to 25% in 2009 among Internet Yellow page searchers, and has gone up from 22% to 27% among general searchers. While the overall usage of ratings is only 24%, it goes up to 57% during the business selection process as users depend on these reviews while selecting companies whom they wish to do business with.

The availability of smartphones has also increased the use of mobile search. While only 19% of regular mobile users use mobile search, 60% of smartphone users do so, and this may well become the primary source of local search in time to come.

Along with the search results for most location-specific queries, Google provides this list of geo-specific search results, which they determine from the keywords in the query and the geographic location of the searcher.

Local Business Results on Google Web Search

The local business results within the universal search results are quite extensive and inclusive. Earlier, they used to appear only when the user included a specific location in his query, but for some time now, Google provides these local business results even for queries without a specific local qualification to the keyword if the query is deemed to be typically meant for localised searches, such as “nearest pizza”.

This universal search result includes detailed information about the businesses in the given location, including phone numbers and direct links to the website.

Due to this addition, the number of referrals to Internet directory services has shown a marked downward trend.

A study of the progress graph of various internet yellow pages, including those in the U.K., Canada and Australia, shows this downward trend.

Decline in percentage visits from search engines

The graph above charts the percentage of visits to the leading UK directory assistance services’ websites that came from a search engine. Over the past 3 months, most of these services have seen a fall of 1% to 8% in the percentage of traffic being referred from search.

While this is bad for these local directories, it is certainly a great convenience for Google’s users, as they do not need to go from one page to another, to find answers to their queries.

It is, of course, possible for these directory assistance sites to fight back, if they are innovative and put in a lot more effort. In fact, some directory services such as Yelp, Zillow and ServiceMagic have managed to maintain steady growth internationally in spite of Google’s onslaught.

Dr. William Webb, head of research and development at Ofcom said that data from mobile phones can be used to study various things, and this is just the beginning. For instance this data can help prevent epidemics of infectious diseases or traffic jams.

The current study found that most people usually move around within a 10 kilometer area.

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, MA think that if all mobile users submitted data to the research labs at leading universities, it would provide a lot of useful information.

GPS surveys have earlier been used to track human activity, but this is an expensive process. The movement of dollar bills has also been used to track human movements, using information from experiment sites such as wheresgeorge.com – the study showed that human beings move about randomly – but since money exchanges hands frequently, the results of the experiment were not very reliable.

The study involving mobile phones covered about 100,000 people from across Europe. Each subject’s location was recorded every time he/she made or received a phonecall, through the mobile base station from where the call was relayed. All participants’ anonymity was well guarded by means of security codes. Also, the exact location of the person was not traceable as each mobile tower serves an area of almost 3 square km.

Patterns began to emerge within the first 3 months of the 6-month experiment. Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who was working with the team, says that most people move only between 5-10 km. Some people however move hundreds of kilometers regularly.

Power Law distributions

Movements of most people follow a pattern known as the Power Law, which is also commonly called the 80/20 rule. In other words, the vast majority of people move within a small radius but a fraction of the general population travels a lot, and contributes to the bulk of travellers worldwide.

Another significant revelation from this study was that people return to the same places repeatedly. According to Barabasi, this is good because, model builders can follow a basic rule book. “The intrinsic similarity between individuals is very exciting and it has practical applications.” This information could be used to monitor the spread of contagious diseases such as Avian flu, and help traffic planners.

Uses of mobile movement tracking

Mobile phones have been used to construct a real time model of traffic in Rome, and Microsoft is working on a project to help people select the ideal route to work. The methods employed by this experiment can also help the police to track criminals, and parents to keep tabs on their children.

Projects and services, such as this one, that rely on sensors on mobile handsets are bound to increase with time, and it will certainly be easy for miscreants to misuse this facility by stalking people. The concerned authorities will have to be extremely cautious before providing the public easy access to such services.

The information collected by these mobile road sensors will be relayed to the driver of the bus and, through wireless means such as mobile phones, wi-fi and WiMAX, to centres where the data collected can be processed and appropriate action taken when necessary.

Patrice Simon, the project coordinator says that efforts are underway to develop a means to detect some kind of problem occurring on the bus itself, such as a fight breaking out. According to him, the devices, though small, are very powerful and should enable creation of systems that can directly inform the police in case of problems.

This project is a Pan-European effort costing 3.83 million Euro. The effort is headed by the University of Applied Sciences in Germany and the Institute for Transport Services in Hungary.

On board units on the new breed of buses will be able to check the road surface and simultaneously analyze the air for fog, rain and smog. The devices will be pollution resistant and can adjust rapidly to environmental changes such as tunnels, bridges or dark roads. It will also be possible to judge traffic conditions around the bus, through a video camera, to spot unauthorized cars in the bus lane, the number of vehicles in adjoining lanes, speeding vehicles, traffic jams and accidents.

While the system is currently in development primarily for government usage, the same technology could very easily be extended to start providing the general public a lot more location specific information in the future, and could make a much wider variety of current information available, greatly expanding the breadth of services that can be offered by mobile local search services.

According to Chris, hotels like the Marriott chain have mastered the art of optimising a site for local search results in multiple cities. They do this by creating dedicated pages to each hotel with specific details for that location and the hotels amenities, which make the page significantly different from pages about other hotels in the same city or other cities.

The main tips Chris shares on optimising multi-location business sites for local search are:

• Create a unique, dedicated page for every office / store / branch / hotel location. Provide the address, contact details, and opening hours for that location. Add specific details about the area, amenities and facilities provided in that particular location and a map and photographs if possible.
   
• Provide search engine friendly links to each and every page. If need be, set up a directory-like structure with the links neatly organised according to location. For a super market chain this could be in the form of a list of counties, which when clicked yield a list of towns and cities, which can be further opened up to yield a list of localities within the city.
   
• Create search friendly URL structures that mirror regular directory structures e.g. www.supermarket-name.com/greater-london/north-west/
   
• Create unique, descriptive Meta Data for each and every localised page. Use popular key phrases, queried by searchers, in the Title tag. For example, “Mortgage Advisor In Oxford Street, Central London”.
   
• Use individual branch promotional budgets to obtain links from other local businesses, newspapers and charities direct to the store location.
   
• Ensure all locations are listed on the Google Local Business Centre. The bulk upload facility will facilitate this. Discuss providing a feed of the locations and their updates to other local search sites such as Internet Yellow pages.