lorenzinho2 - 5:38 pm on Mar 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

They are scraping, but are clearly referencing the source site, and showing only snippets of the review with links to the entire content. My guess is that publishers won't have a problem with it as they will benefit from the traffic.

One sort of odd thing to me - Google doesn't attempt to show an overall rating for the merchant. IMHO, this detracts substantially from the value of this feature. As is, it sort of reads like a subjective set of random reviews from the Web. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a rating system that doesn't at least attempt to answer the question, "so overall, is this a good or a bad place?" Isn't that what the user is looking for?

Also interesting to me is that with all the talk of G looking to get more involved with content (with the rumors of their interest in About.com for example), this move indicates that they are not ready to play in content yet. Cause if they were, allowing folks to review local search results would have been a perfect place to start.

Only time will tell if Yahoo's approach of collecting and owning their own local review content is wiser than Google's approach of scraping others' content and referencing the source.