Google HotPot: Find Local Search Recommendations From Your Social Circle

Soumen Halder — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:00:41 +0000

Discovering new places or locations can be really tricky. Let’s say you are traveling to a different country or city and would want to know the famous restaurants, shopping centers, historic places and other places of interest in the same location. There are three options – either ask the local citizens, buy a local guide book or search the internet. Often times, I would go for the third option because the internet contains fresh and up to the minute information from all over the globe.

We have earlier discussed some useful tricks on performing country specific Google searches and some other special Google search tricks. Just a couple of days ago, Google launched yet another service called Google Hotpot which allows users to discover local search recommendations from your social circle.

According to Google, HotPot aims to make local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy. Everybody have their own likes and dislikes and Google HotPot aims to understand your liking and offer relevant places suggestion, which are personalized by you and your social circle. In short – Google HotPot is nothing but a local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends.

To start using Google Hotpot, go to google.com/hotpot and you will be asked to set up your public Google places nickname and upload a profile avatar.

Hit the “Start Rating” button and you are all set discovering new places using the Google Hotpot service. In the next page, you will see that Google has automatically detected your current location, as shown below:

Searching Locations Using Google Hotpot

Type relevant search terms on the Google Hotpot box and you will be shown local search locations.

Note: you must be signed in to your Google account in order to see the personalized recommendations.

Example: I searched for “Hotels” and here is what I was shown:

There are a few things worth noting here. First, only those search results which closely match with your location and the typed terms ( keywords used for search) are shown. Next, the search results are ordered according to user ratings, this means that recommendations of a particular place from your social friends will appear higher in the search results. Third, you are shown a small preview of the location so that you can quickly decide which location you are interested in.

You can click through any result or open it in a new tab to get the complete location information, street address, reaching directions and in some cases phone number or email address of the organization.

Should you want to save a preferred location for later reference or want to discard it, just click through the required option on top of the search result. Clicking the “Not Interested” button will immediately remove the result from your HotPot result and it won’t appear if you perform the same search later.

You can also write a review of a place, location, hotel, restaurant, historic place etc. This is useful, because your friends will be able to read your feedback if they perform the same search on the same location.

When you are done rating at least 5 or more search results, Google Hotpot will try to understand your liking and will show personalized search results matching within your HotPot social circle.

The next step is to add friends to your Google Hotpot profile. You can invite friends from your Google profile, by clicking the Friends tab on the left sidebar and then selecting “Add Friends” button as shown below:

Once you have added all or selected friends, you are all set to receive personalized “Place recommendations” directly on your Google HotPot profile. Whenever any of your friends rate or review a place, you will be able to see it from the “Friends” tab in the left sidebar. Since the service has been launched only a week ago, don’t expect the recommendations right away. But as more and more people start using Google HotPot, I am sure it will be the Go to option to get personalized location based information.

You can read the official blog post on the Google latlong blog for more information.

What’s your take on Google Hotpot? Have you started using yet ? Do share your ideas in the comments.

Google HotPot: Find Local Search Recommendations From Your Social Circle originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
Follow us at Facebook | Twitter

Automatically Rate Songs in Your iTunes – Mac Only

Jeffry Thurana — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:06:23 +0000

In my personal opinion as both Mac and Windows users, iTunes is the best music player I’ve come across. The simple yet intuitive interface alone is enough to make me ditch other players out there. And there are many other powerful features which hides behind the simplicity of the appearance.

One of the iTunes features that I like most is the rating system. Users can tag any song with one to five stars based on their preferences, and users can sort or filter the playlist based on the rating. A quick glance at someone’s iTunes display and you can clearly tell which songs he/she likes and dislikes.

The rating system really is a great idea; but, and this is a big but (no pun intended), the bigger the song list, the more difficult for users to give rating to each and every song. Can you imagine editing 2376 songs one by one? That’s the size of a tiny part of my current song list. (And I don’t know anybody who has less than 100 songs on their list).

AutoRate to the rescue

Luckily, there’s an application called AutoRate which can help iTunes users to rate their songs. This app tries to ‘guess’ user’s listening preferences and give rate to each song automatically by looking at how often each track is played and how many times each track is skipped.

The formula uses a combination of play and skip frequency (averaged out over the life of each track), and the play and skip count. Tracks that are frequently skipped are penalised, while often-played tracks are given a higher rating.

Both the track play count and skip count are used in conjunction with the length of time each track has been in your library to determine, on a relative basis, how much you like each track. Ratings become dynamic and change with your taste in music following how you listen to your songs.

That is why you will get no rating for the track that has never been played.

The Simplicity

Before using AutoRate, please make sure that you have iTunes version 7 and above, and Mac OS X 10.5 (and above). If those requirements are met, download and install the app.

The usage is simple: you just open it, and click the “Begin” button. It will analyze your playlist, then assign the ratings automatically based on the result.

There are some adjustments that you can make via the Preferences, such as:
- which playlist folders to be given ratings to. (General)

- how would you like to set up the rating system. (Rating)

- whether to use full star or half star rating. (Advanced)

With AutoRate, my iTunes playlist has grown a little bit more mature without me having to do the hard work.

One last note, you would want to run AutoRate every once in a while to keep the rating system up to date.

Have you use AutoRate? Or do you have other alternatives of similar app? Please share using the comment below.

Automatically Rate Songs in Your iTunes – Mac Only originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
Follow us at Facebook | Twitter