Google Guns for Yelp Using the Site’s Own Reviews

Google is bullish on location services and local content and for good reason. Being able to serve accurate and highly-targeted content means that the ads around it are worth a lot more as well. And Google’s latest update to the Google Maps for Android shows that it’s not afraid of using all of its weapons to move ahead in the space.

The biggest new feature is the Places integration. Google Places is a service available in Google Maps which provides aggregated content relevant to a certain place, be it restaurant, business, transit spot, landmark and so on. The Places integration in Google Maps 4.4 for Android is pretty thorough and you can read more about it here.

But if you’ve ever used Google Places you’ll know that it uses content from a variety of places to fill out the space. General descriptions come from Wikipedia, the location from Google Maps, obviously, and so on. But a big emphasis has also been put on the reviews for the places, also aggregated from several sources.

Google Places is less than a year long but has seen several updates in that time. And each one of them brings it one step closer on a collision course with existing players in the space, notably Yelp. Seeing as Google actually tried to buy Yelp, and was prepared to offer quite a lot of money for it, it’s obvious that Google wants in.

While the acquisition failed, Google is not giving up and is moving forward on its own. Interestingly though, while Google Places is starting to compete with Yelp, it also uses a lot of content from the reviews site, like TechCrunch notes. Google Places’ scope is larger than Yelp’s, but it does raise an interesting question. Google doesn’t license any of the content from Yelp and while it can be argued that it’s fair use and that it links to the original source, it goes beyond what Google does with search engine.