Google Adds Nearby Places Recommendations to Place Pages

Google launched Place Pages for Google Maps just a few moths ago, but it's already becoming a pretty interesting product. The company plans to create a page for every 'place' on Earth and the tool certainly has a lot of potential. Google has definitely invested in it and has been adding new features at a rapid pace. The latest move though is an interesting one, to say the least. Place Pages now have a "Nearby places you might like" section which, you guessed it, suggests other businesses and places around the location. While this could prove useful to the users, not many small business owners would think Google recommending up to ten competitors on their own page is a great idea.

"Now on Google Maps, you can get these types of suggestions automatically. Just look up a place that you know or love, and we'll provide a set of "Nearby places you might like." Here we have a set of recommended places near Yonah Schimmel's Knishes Bakery [in the photo below]," Tammy Stern from the Google Maps team wrote.

Place Pages were launched in September and the stated goal was to create a dedicated page filled with information people might find useful about every location, landmark, shop or business on Earth. It features info from Wikipedia, if available, photos, videos, user reviews, public transport info an anything else that may come in handy. Very recently it has added the possibility for small business owners to post short announcements on the page to advertise a special offer or event, so there was a clear interest in getting the owners of the places involved and invested in the page for their business.

This is why this latest feature is not going to go down well with the local businesses, nobody wants to invest effort into a tool that advertises your competitors. Google tries to spin it somewhat by saying just how useful it is for the users, which is true, and also by saying that the recommendations aren't necessarily competitors, i.e. in the same market. "You'll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions," Stern explains. In practice though, most recommended places are very much competitors.