By allowing people to perform in-depth research of products and services according to their own needs and wants, the internet has empowered the consumer in ways that were unimagined just a few years ago. However, the volume of information available can make the task of sifting through it overwhelming; people seek out communities and voices to help guide them in making buying decisions. Websites with reviews of products and services, specialized sites that focus only on reviews, and user groups and forums help to fill this voracious need for advice. In this way, online reviews of products and services have become incredibly important to Search Engine Marketing in general, and to the hospitality industry in particular.

In the world of travel, Trip Advisor, a website where consumers are encouraged to advise others of their experiences, has long been the leading review site. Yahoo Travel has also become a powerhouse in this niche. It collects reviews from wherever they can be found, displays them together, and allows the user to roughly sort them according to his or her preferences. Google Maps - aka Google Local - also displays reviews gathered from a variety of sources, including Yahoo Travel.

With a June 2006 patent filing, “Method and system for finding and aggregating reviews for a product“, Google is now working to improve the process of providing the most relevant results to those searching for reviews. To quote from the filing:

“Many Internet users research a product (e.g., a Canon digital camera) or a service (e.g., a hotel room in Hawaii) before obtaining it. Currently, the approach that many users follow is to use Internet search engines. Users issue a search query that contains the product or service name plus terms like “review” and sift through the myriad of results that are returned by the search engine. While some of these results do contain reviews about the product, many results do not. Moreover, it is very difficult to get a holistic view of all the reviews. In short, this process is fairly cumbersome, time consuming, and inefficient”

“Alternatively, users may go to Web sites that provide reviews and ratings for products, such as www.amazon.com, www.epinions.com, and www.circuitcity.com. A few sites, such as www.rottentomatoes.com, movies.yahoo.com, and www.consumersearch.com, aggregate reviews for the same product from several sites. However, some of these sites aggregate reviews manually, which is very inefficient and limits the number of reviews that can be gathered for each product. Moreover, all of these sites are very limited in the tools they provide users to navigate through the reviews.”

“Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide tools that enable users to more efficiently conduct research on the products and services they are interested in obtaining (e.g., by purchase, lease, rental, or other similar transaction).”

Here is my interpretation of what Google would, ideally, like to do:

• Crawl review websites, websites containing reviews, and forum postings to retrieve information about products and services.
• Match up products/services with reviews about them in as much depth as possible - business information, type of product/service, brand, model number and so on.
• Aggregate and store all of these reviews in a predetermined format on one or more dedicated review servers.
• Identify and aggregate frequently-occurring terms that are associated with a product or service in the reviews.
• Arrive at an average rating for each product and service.

When a searcher seeks this type of information, the review results may be displayed in various ways (which the searcher can then click on to read the full review):

• Title and summary
• First portion
• Snippet that is most relevant to the search term
• Most important part of the review, as determined by a yet-to-be-identified process

Searchers may be given various options for sorting results according to their own preferences:

• Dates - The most recent information is usually the most trusted, because it reflects the latest experiences of consumers.
• Voice - People often trust the advice of one reviewer or review site over others, so they will be able to set preferences as to which reviews are displayed to them. It may be possible to choose different voices according to the category being searched, such as hotels, movies, electronics, etc.
• Weighting - Searchers will be able to personalize the ratings they see by giving the reviews of certain websites more weighting than the reviews of other websites.

With this patent, Google is most definitely validating the need to filter out some of the noise on the ‘net so that searchers can find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently - it’s still all about relevance. It’s also another step towards the inexorable personalization of Search Engine Results.

For the hospitality industry, this reinforces the importance of monitoring and managing your online reputation. The social web becomes more entwining, interconnected and influential every day. You cannot afford to ignore what is being said about your business online!

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

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Categories: Featured Articles, SEO, Travel Marketing, Web 2.0.
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