Jul 22, 2011 14:01 GMT  ·  By

Google Places is getting an overhaul. It's part of the major redesign that is sweeping across all of Google's products and started with Google+. But there's more to it that a visual revamp, the new Google Places also comes with a few changes, the biggest of which is the removal of third-party reviews.

If you visit a place page on Google, you'll notice that it adopted the same visual style now found on several Google products, including the flagship Google+ and the search engine.

Google Maps was one of the first to switch to the new design so it makes sense that Places do the same. The now familiar elements are visible throughout, the grayed out header, the skinned buttons and so on.

"Making constant tweaks and adjustments to our user interfaces and overall user experience have always been the norm at Google, and you may have recently heard about our renewed effort across all Google products to make the user experience more focused, elastic and effortless," Avni Shah, director of Product Management at Google, wrote.

"Changes have already started to appear on Google Maps, and we’ve now simplified our Place pages across desktop and mobile devices as well," he announced.

Google wanted to make it clearer and easier for users to add photos for the places they like, so there is now a much more prominently placed Upload Photo button.

At the same time, Google wants more people writing about their experience at various places, so it also placed a hard-to-miss "Write a Review" button. This feature is based on Hotpot, the experimental product Google launched last fall and which was later rolled into Places.

With more reviews from Google users, the company has decided, no doubt thanks to a lot of pressure from those affected, to no longer display snippets of reviews from various websites.

Instead, it will rely solely on its own data, but it still links to third-party sites that have reviews for the place. This is something that Yelp and others have been arguing with Google over for months now, but it should be very interesting to see the effect the move has on those sites.

Because those sites would much rather have Google pay for the snippets than have any trace of them removed from places which will certainly lead to a drop in traffic.