Google Hotpot

» see google.com/hotpot as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Hotpot opened in the United States in November 2010 and reached the rest of the world at the start of 2011, which means it was asking me to rate restaurants for my friends at a point when nobody I knew rated restaurants for anybody. Writing a star count for strangers was an American habit then, built on top of an American product nobody here was using. I watched this one go past from a long way off.

The name confused everyone, so Google explained it. A hot pot is a meal where everybody cooks in the same pot, and the pitch was that your recommendations got better the more people dropped something in. You rated places you had been. Your friends rated places they had been. Google local results then reordered themselves around the people you actually knew rather than around a crowd of strangers.

Underneath that was a directory of more than fifty million places and a problem Google had been carrying for a year. Its Places pages leaned on ratings scraped from third parties, and the third parties had started objecting loudly. Hotpot was the attempt to grow a review corpus Google owned from the first keystroke.

It worked well enough that Google killed it. On 8 April 2011 the Lat Long blog ran a post called "Hotpot is going Places", product manager Lior Ron said rolling Hotpot into Google Places would simplify the connection between rating a place and finding one, and the Hotpot address began redirecting. Nothing about what the thing did changed. The word went in the bin.

~ the case file ~

~ why google needed it ~

In December 2009 Google had reportedly agreed to buy Yelp for around half a billion dollars and then watched the deal collapse. What Yelp had was not technology, it was eight years of reviews written by people who had been there, and that is the one asset you cannot buy a second time or build in a quarter.

Hotpot was the build-it answer. It also explains why Google was willing to dissolve the brand so fast: the goal was never a destination called Hotpot, it was the ratings, and the ratings transferred intact to Google Places, from there to Google+ Local, and eventually into the review stars sitting in Google Maps today.

~ the five months ~

Google put real money behind it, in marketing as well as in engineering. By the time it ended, the service was pulling over a million ratings a month and accounted for as much as 37 percent of reviews in some markets, numbers Google itself was quoting on the way out. Those are not shutdown numbers. They are the numbers you quote when you want to explain why a thing you are ending was worth doing.

What died on 8 April 2011 was a word and a URL. Everything behind them was promoted.

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