

Google Hotpot now on Google.com and around the world - yarapavan
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-hotpot-now-on-googlecom-and.html

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zacharypinter
Funny timing. I like the layout of the results, but their number of stars and
number of reviews is piggybacking primarily off of yelp (as well as others
like urbanspoon and citysearch). When that data was being aggregated in
search, it didn't seem too strange. However, now that they're directly
competing with yelp, it seems unfair to be "stealing" their review data.

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nuclear_eclipse
Is it really stealing though, if they explicitly mention the source of each
review, and link the user to the primary site?

AFAIK, the issue with Bing was that it wasn't attributing it's modified
results as being aggregated from other sources.

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paganel
Talking about "stealing content"... On this link , for example
([http://www.google.com/hotpot?q=restaurante+bucuresti&ssp...](http://www.google.com/hotpot?q=restaurante+bucuresti&sspn=0.083209%2C0.100561&sll=44.433294%2C26.085722#)),
there's no direct link to the restaurant's website.

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DeusExMachina
There is no direct link on the list page you link, but when you look at the
details of any restaurant the link is there with phone numbers and other
details.

Anyway, even if it was the case, how do you classify this as "stealing
content" (with an obvious reference to the recent Google/Bing fight)? They are
offering a service, posting user generated reviews of restaurants and sending
new clients to them. It does not even go close to stealing in my opinion.

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paganel
> but when you look at the details of any restaurant the link is there with
> phone numbers and other details.

Yeah, of course I saw that, but there's the second issue with it: Long story
short, I used to be directly involved in building a couple of this type of
aggregators (or "vertical search engines", as they were called 2-3 years ago),
and we were particularly careful to include a direct link to the webpage we
were getting the results from on our SERPS, and also we DID NOT display any
contact information for the adds in question (cars and real-estate), as that
would have just stolen user clicks from the sites we were parsing (what's the
user's incentive to click to the website anymore? if he can see the price and
all the contact info he needs on our pages).

But mind you, we didn't have Google's lawyers, nor their clout, nor their
"don't be evil" slogan, maybe that's the reason why they can do these sorts of
things while others think twice about it.

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bemmu
Kayak / Expedia / other hotel listing sites just got owned. "Hotels
Tokyo"-type queries must be a big driver for traffic for them. These HotPot
results push organic links to those way down.

For hotels themselves SEO just turned into HPO.

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StavrosK
The really salient point here is that Google is providing users with results
that it got from sites like Yelp through aggregation. Google asks for Yelp's
data promising to link back to them, Yelp has no real choice because everyone
else will be giving their data away so Yelp doesn't want to lose
clickthroughs, Google uses the data to provide 90% of what users want to see
on their pages, thus only generating 10% clickthroughs, and now they're
getting more aggressive.

In summary, restaurant/bar review websites provided Google with data, Google
will eventually eat their lunch.

