Google Adds Hotpot Recommendations to Regular Search Results

Google announced that it is now adding results from Hotpot right in regular Google.com search results (with the local Google Places results it’s already putting there).

If you’re not familiar with Hotpot, launched late last year, this video pretty much sums it up:

The move was inevitable, and it’s available in 38 languages now, and it certainly makes search results more social. That is if you actually have friends using Hotpot. I’d say there’s a good chance you probably have more friends using Twitter, however, and they’re naturally talking about local businesses, restaurants, etc. That’s why I’m anticipating some kind of integration for the recently picked up fflick technology, which the company says is for YouTube, into search results.

In a recent article at Bloomberg BusinessWeek talking about Google’s mysterious "social layer" project, it said:

Two sources familiar with it, who asked not to be named because the project is not yet public, confirm that it is tentatively called Google +1 and that it is designed to cull data about relationships among users from current services such as Gmail and YouTube.Google will then let users share material through those connections, while using the information to make other products more social. Search results may be skewed toward pages that your friends found useful—for instance, a Google Maps query for nearby Italian restaurants could return one that was positively reviewed by someone you know. (emphasis added).

If Google tapped more than just its native Hotpot for delivering friends’ reviews of search results, it could be very powerful. What if you got results from friends on Twitter, Foursquare, and other check-in services? They did just add new ways to check in with Google Latitude.

For now, it’s just Hotpot though, so we won’t get too far ahead of ourselves. Either way, Google is more aggressively trying to deliver personalized recommendations. The review sites like Yelp, who are already critical of Google, are going to love this.

There are 3 Comments. Add Yours.

Adsense Publisher
February 2, 2011 at 9:31 pm

Google needs to get rid of the maps and book results and all that junk.
Google products do not belong in an organic search, except as filters.
If I wanted to search their maps, I’d search their maps.

I think they are creating an unfair advantage with their product and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Justice Department wasn’t already looking into if what Google is doing is considered to be anti-competitive when they purposely place the results from certain products like Google maps first above everything else.

They already have a button where if you want to do the same search in Google maps, you just click the button. Google should get rid of the maps in the results and give us what we want, which is organic results. They need to make search less cluttered. That’s what I’m doing with my directories.
We’re giving people better functionality without throwing up a bunch of junk everywhere.
Menu’s are there for a reason.

If anything, I think Google should let users add or remove other Google product results from the search (except ads of course, cause how would they pay for everything?).
Kain
February 9, 2011 at 4:45 am

I’m more worried by the privacy aspects of this.

I dont want the worlds largest data mining company telling me what food I like.

That’s why I use two browsers: one just to log in for Google stuff like adwords and adsense.

The other for everything else which has all Google cookies blocked.
Ejvind@latterkursus
April 22, 2011 at 5:05 am

It’s definetely a balance act. Google has always been about relevance, and to be fair, when people search something, it’s usually to find information about that thing. If the search relates to hairdresser, it’s fait to say that the search is locally based, since you would only look for a hairdresser in your neighbourhood, if you are like 80% of the population.
If the search is about oilspill, it usually pertains news, and if the search is about right wing/left wing politics, it’s probably nationwide. So to give the best results, it is necessary to have diferent algorithms regarding different search terms and words. Difficult, but definetely the way to go in the future.