Business Reviews Added To Google Maps

Google will tap its users for business reviews to complement the ones they collect from other online sources and display.

User-generated content has been at the core of the success of social media sites. Google will try tapping the desire of people to share their opinions on local businesses through the Google Maps service.

Such user-contributed reviews have been a fixture on Yahoo's competing product for some time. As with that service, Google requires reviewers to login to post their thoughts about a business.

Those reviews and other content as appropriate appear when the "More Info" link for a business has been clicked. For example, a hotel link has an overview of its features, details, reviews, photos, and web pages listed for its additional information.

From the reviews option, one can add their thoughts about the business from Google Maps. The reviewer adds a title and their review, and can select a star rating for the business in question. The nickname in use for the logged-in user can be edited to something different.

When searching for a type of business, people have the option to take a look at existing user-created content. A link at the bottom of the search results for a query leads to the available reviews placed on Google Maps previously.

There are some bugs to work out with the reviews. Searching for a dentist in Chicago brought up about 22 reviews, but not all of the content returned were reviews. One was a job listing for a network development manager with 'dentist' in the description; the listing came from Indeed.com.
Another review was a news story about a 79-year-old would-be bank robber who claimed to have come from a dentist and could only talk quietly. Neither of these results fulfilled what should have been review results.

Source:www.webpronews.com