A Place Page is a web page for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.
You can get to a Place Page by clicking on "more info" in search results, or by clicking "more info" in the mini-bubble. Now, instead of just getting a slightly bigger bubble, you'll get an entire page of rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.
- Lior Ron, Senior Product Manager, Place Page team
The real game changer, as identified by Mashable is that these pages, as opposed to the earlier pop-up bubbles, are now indexable. I'll let Mashable focus on the potential threat to Yelp! and Techcruch debate about whetter Google would give place pages preferential placement in search results).
To me the more interesting thing is how this could change a small business owner's need for a website. In some cases Place Pages do a better job than the business itself. Let's look at my beloved Porto's, in my mind, the best Cuban bakery in Los Angeles. The potato balls are outstanding and the Cuban sandwiches a steal. Umm, What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Place Pages. Porto's website is functional but fails to capture the bustling energy and is missing the prerequisite food porn photographs. Mmm... mango mousse (sorry). But that's OK, I rather these guys be working the ovens than art directing a website. But you look at Porto's Google Place Page there's user reviews, pictures (OK, maybe not food porn but better than the Porto's site and and the menu courtesy of Zagat.com (Porto's own site has it as a PDF).
Don't get me wrong, I manage a website and I know how hard it's to keep it up to date. To have something like this come up and it happens to pull out of date admission and hours of operations from Frommers is well, annoying. But even then I have to admit this is pretty darn cool.
Of course Google Place Pages won't replace a company's website (yet). But does a small mom and pop need to create a website anymore? Sure, if you want to get email lists, present your business in a certain way, etc. But if you claim your business through Google's Local Business Center you can put in all the relevant information, upload pictures, and even get metrics on the people that are clicking on your place page. If you are small business owner with no access to the Internet, Google, other sites and users will go about creating it for you.
Trip planning just got a lot more fun.
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