Website design, SEO and other Estate Agent News
17
Nov
Google hotpot
Amongst the news of iTunes unleashing The Beatles, and Facebook
unveiling a new messaging system (that’s not email, but
funnily enough does include an email address at facebook.com), a
certain Google service has taken a back seat.
Enter Google Hotpot.
Dubbed as the search engine for Google Places, Google Hotpot
takes into account customer reviews and ratings to give users the
best business results for their particular enquiry.
Once you visit the Hotpot homepage, you are asked to give your name and
sign in with your Google account. Once in, it displays
‘restaurants’ as a default and asks the user to search
their local area.
The interface seems like a minimalistic version of Bing’s
shopping feature, which makes it clean and certainly easy to
use.
This alone will not make give Hotpot that je ne sais quoi, so
Google have done their best to integrate a little bit of social.
All reviews are linked to your Google profile so users can find out
what their friends think of local places.
Personally I think that this would be a great idea, but the
majority of people simply do not use their Google profile.
Similar to Buzz we might, just might, find that this also
gathers digital dust.
To give a fair argument, this could be leading to a new social
network that will integrate all these services in one amazing
package – only possible if Google offers users something that
isn’t offered by Facebook.
James Coyne – eMarketing and Social Media
Consultant
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