Up until now, whenever somebody searched for a place, a movie or a TV show Google would bring up a number of reviews related to the search term. These reviews would be pulled from a few trusted sites like, IMBD or Rotten Tomatoes. Now, though, Google is bringing a new feature to its search results, one it calls “Reviews from the Web,” which will mean Google’s search results will now display reviews from any third-party site.
As part of the feature, the company will gather reviews from up to three different sites for any place, TV show or movie and order them in terms of relevance. Basically, this means that the search engine’s results will now include user-written reviews, giving them the opportunity to be read by other people, instead of the usual critic or “expert” reviews. Only last month did the company introduce its best-of-lists and its critic reviews for local search, though sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp weren’t allowed to appear in these results due to their reviews coming from users – something the company was largely criticized for. With this new update, this will change and these websites will now be eligible to appear. The only requirement is that the sites implement Google’s review snippet markup. As well as this new feature, Google will also start collecting its own reviews that will be displayed alongside critics reviews and the new reviews from third-party sites. Google is allowing any qualified critic to display their own reviews in one of the search engine’s rich cards which are larger boxes with a snippet of the full review. The internet giant has confirmed that the new features will be rolled out gradually over the next 24 hours.
The addition of these new changes comes only a few days after the company announced the new “Shop the Look” feature that is currently in the testing phase. The feature allows users to search for clothes or home décor and also shop for them without leaving the search engine itself. It’s clear that with the addition of these the company is trying its best to keep users inside the search engine by allowing them to do everything they want without actually entering any other websites and therefore increasing Google’s overall potential revenue.