Add Friends on Hotpot, Get Great Place Recommendations

Whether you’re looking for a good plumber or a great date night location, your friends are always the ones you turn to for recommendations. Take my friend Caitlin for instance. She’s a San Francisco restaurant connoisseur who I always hit up when I’m looking for a new place to try.

Hotpot gives you the ability to add friends whose tastes you trust. Once they’re added, you’ll start to see their place recommendations in your Google Maps search results. As you add more and more friends on Hotpot, your search results will be even more personal and relevant to you, creating a much richer search and maps experience. Naturally, Caitlin was one of the first friends I added on Hotpot, and I’ve been using her recommendations ever since.

Some of you have asked us how this whole adding friends thing works. It’s really easy, here’s how:

• Visit google.com/hotpot, and click Friends List along the left.
• Click the Add Friends button on the right navigation box.
• Enter the email addresses of people you’d like to add as friends in the text box, and click Add.
  
  
  

Once you’ve added a friend, they’ll receive an email asking them to share recommendations with you on Google Places. After they confirm your friendship, you’ll start to see their recommendations in search results. Here’s one of Caitlin’s recommendations that popped up during one of my recent Maps searches:

You can see your friends’ recommendations when searching on maps.google.com, and on Google Maps for mobile on Android.

Have your friends recommendations led you to a new local gem? Share your finds in the comments.

Cecelia Stewart, Google Hotpot Product Specialist