• Natural Search Blog , Friday, June 13, 2008 2:45 PM

Google Maps has added snippets of reviews to business listings, so now users can quickly gain an impression of a business--and either decide to find out more or move on. Innovative and interesting, yes. Beneficial to businesses and searchers? Perhaps not, according to Chris Silver Smith.

First, most users make decisions based on the average impression from a number of reviews--weeding out the excessively bad or good experiences, until a holistic picture emerges. One review is effectively useless, particularly when there's a limited amount of space available in a listing already.

And how is Google determining which review gets displayed? "While many/most samples I've seen are showing very positive review snippets, some are displaying one of the negative review snippets," Smith says. "It may be that random snippets are displayed, or it could be that the snippet comes from the first review of the first review provider for them. I think it'd be great if Google were actually doing some algorithmic evaluation to try to display a snippet from the most-typical review rather than the apparently-random choice."

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