A few months ago Google rolled out Place Pages with the lofty vision of creating a webpage for every place in the world. In addition to a map-view of local businesses, users can access hours, transit stops, reviews and geo-tagged photos. As of today the company is offering a color-coded ranking system for specific aspects of a businesses’ services. The question is, does the new feature mark the beginning of the end for restaurant review sites? Sponsor While Yelp gives reviewers a chance to rank a business on a scale of 1-5 stars and Foodspotting ranks individual dishes, Google’s new ranking system aggregates comments from across the web based on specific keywords. At a moments glance, users can quickly view a restaurant’s food and service in relation to its ambiance and atmosphere. Even the smallest business with little to no web presence can produce useful results. For example, the comments at San Francisco’s El Metate Taqueria was enough to produce a ranking on salsa alone. In late November, ReadWriteWeb covered the launch of Google’s map-based coupon program where mobile users can access deals through Place Pages. Coupled with the fact that you can save your search results to your favorite maps, users may find less and less reason to visit location-based review sites. In your opinion can Google oust Yelp and Citysearch as the leader in business reviews? Let us know in the comments below. Discuss

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Google Adds Place-Ranking System, Should Yelp Be Afraid?

Google has announced today that, just in time for holiday shopping, they are enabling local retailers to display coupons for in-store use on mobile devices of Google-searching users. Any business using Google Local Business Center can upload mobile coupon offers, and any user searching on Google.com using a mobile device can find the coupons on the businesses’ Place Pages – a feature that also debuted relatively recently. Altogether, the direction the company is taking seems better for users and for local businesses, as well. Sponsor Printable coupons have long been available on Google Maps, but – let’s face it – more and more consumers have abandoned the desktop/printer paradigm for a more mobile/digital approach to search, on-the-go directions, and local business research. Product manager Alex Gawley wrote on the Google Mobile blog, “With more of you going mobile to search for this information, it makes sense for coupons to go mobile too… We hope you find these mobile coupons useful and that they help you save money, trees (fewer printed coupons), and your hands (from paper cuts) when you’re on the go.” Place Pages for the desktop have also been revamped to ensure that mobile and printed coupons will share a common look and feel, regardless of the device, the OS, or the browser in which they originated. It will be interesting to hear and read post-holiday metrics and success (or “opportunity for improvement”) stories about these new mobile coupons. While we certainly hope the setup will allow users to quickly and conveniently engage with the world around them – and we likewise hope local retailers can reach out to customers wherever they are – we wonder how many quickly the coupons will take off and how much users will be inclined to use them. Would you redeem a mobile coupon you found through Google search, and under what circumstances or conditions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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Google Brings Local Business Coupons to U.S. Mobile Users