Discover more places you'll like based on people who're like you

The best recommendations usually come from sources you trust, like the friends and family with whom you share ratings and reviews through Google Places. But let’s face it, your nearest and dearest don’t always enjoy the same kinds of places as you. For example, you might appreciate the artistry of a fine red wine reduction while your buddy goes for anything fast and cheap; or you might prefer the vegetarian end of the spectrum while your significant other can’t imagine a meal without meat.

So to help you find more recommendations from people who do actually share your tastes, we’ve come up with a new experimental feature for Google Places we’re calling, quite simply, “People like you.”

To do this, our system automatically compares the places you’ve rated against the places rated by other Google Places users, and identifies people whose taste overlap — meaning you both tend to like and dislike the same places. Now, you can see all the places that people who are “like-minded” with you enjoy, since there’s a very good chance you’re going to love them too. Just click on people’s nicknames to see their full set of recommendations.

We hope you’ll find this new feature to be a fun, useful way for you to benefit from the expertise and experiences of people that share your tastes, and enable you to discover even more great places outside your immediate sphere. From the screenshot above you can tell that Magnolia Gastropub is getting a lot of love from people like me, so I’m definitely adding it to my list of places to visit soon with the confidence that I’ll love it. (Bonus: I happen to live nearby!)

Have fun exploring the recommendations of other Google Places users just like you.

Posted by Mat Balez, Product Manager, Google Places