More questions and answers from Twitter. Thanks for submitting, @TA_Watch, @france_normandy, @mblumenthal, @davidecorradi and @JohnParkes:
Q: @TA_Watch – Why should we believe that TA has consumer interests at heart and not its own interests?
@france_normandy – Do you agree that both Google and TA have commercial interests at heart more than the consumer?
A: The reason I started TripAdvisor 10 years ago was to offer a place where travelers from around the world can easily research and plan the perfect trip. User-generated content is the life blood of this company – TripAdvisor has the world’s largest travel community with more than 40 million unique monthly visitors that have provided more than 40 million reviews and opinions on our site. It’s the collective wisdom of the crowds expressed through these millions of reviews and opinions that make TripAdvisor such an invaluable tool for consumers.
In addition, TripAdvisor strives to give owners an ability to respond and comment on the reviews (both positive and critical) that our traveler community has shared. Google Places presents TripAdvisor’s content in a way that we feel inadequately represents this wisdom of the crowds. For instance, Google picks out one quote from one review to represent the sentiment of thousands of reviews. It’s not a good way to represent the opinions of all of our users and severely takes away from travelers’ ability to make informed decisions. Google also omits the owner’s right to respond, thus not offering the full scope of information that helps consumers make informed decisions.
Q: @TA_Watch – I agree Google should not pimp Places, but why should Google cache TA reviews yet not display them?
A: Google search has always been focused on producing the highest quality results for users. We believe that our website fulfills that goal across a wide variety of travel-related searches. We support Google displaying our content in organic search, ranking the results based on relevance and usefulness to the consumer as they have historically. Our objection is to how Google has recently chosen to display and summarize our content within their Google Places product. We have asked Google to remove our content from Google Places as we don’t think the way it is being displayed is good for consumers.
Q: @mblumenthal – How does the hotel benefit by TripAdvisor pulling their reviews from Google?
A: For hotels to thrive on any site, consumers must have a great user experience. We’ve pulled our reviews because Google Places doesn’t offer a good consumer experience.
Q: @davidecorradi – With Google Places is Google giving an unfair advantage to PPC reducing the quality / value/ importance of its Organic results?
A: Yes. Google is taking up a huge part of the screen for Google Places, thereby pushing the valuable organic results further away from the user’s view.
Q: @JohnParkes – John Parkes TA block google cos they think places covers up more relevant traffic, once G stops indexing TA how will that affect TA???
A: TripAdvisor is not blocking Google from crawling our site.
Steve
2 Comments
It makes sense that TA looses some value when Google displays their reviews, but doesn’t encourage people to click thru to TA. At the same time, accommodations may loose some value when TripAdvisor gets people to click to the TA website to read reviews, but doesn’t provide links for these interested buyers to contact the property.
I like everything about TripAdvisor, but it is geared to favour the guest and not the property. Based on that, I wonder why any accommodation would want TA reviews be they good, bad or indifferent.
How abt providing a api to use your data?