Aug 2, 2011 15:34 GMT  ·  By

Google's Hotpot experiment is still proving useful for Google Places. The recommendations feature is providing Google and its users with a great source of information when looking up new places.

Until now though, these recommendations came from people you knew, the idea being that you are going to trust them more and that they'll be more relevant for you.

There are a couple of problems with this approach. For one, it is very possible that not enough of your friends have visited a place to get an idea of what it's like.

Second, your friends are not guaranteed to like the same things you like, in fact it's probably more likely that you'll have more in common with people you don't know, as far as tastes and preferences go, than with many of your friends.

This is why Google is introducing a second way of recommending places, which is more of a backup solution for now, based on what other people, who share your interests and tastes, like.

"Headed to a new, unfamiliar city and — gasp! — don’t have any friends who’ve been there either?," Stephen Spence, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"If you’ve rated and reviewed places on Google, we’ll automatically use that data to unearth great recommendations for you, from people that share your tastes," he explained.

That may seem obvious, but there's a reason why Google hasn't introduced this yet, it's rather hard to determine what your tastes are and who are the people that share them.

This also depended on how many people used Google Places for reviews and recommendations.

"Look for these new recommendations — for restaurants, bars, spas, you name it — in your Google and Google Maps search results for desktop and mobile," he added.