[arron61]

Google Places is just another search engine but specifically for places (aka restaurants and stores). It used to be the case that it will aggregate all reviews from multiple review sites and show snippets of the reviews and then have a corresponding link for them to click on to go to the real site.

So in a sense, it's really just another search engine again, no different than the universal Google search, image search, product search, and etc. It's using the same indexed data but presented in two forms. Yelp wanted Google to remove them from product search and not universal search. This is why the google lawyer said this requires extra engineering. Yelp basically wants one thing and not another.

If you do a product search now, of course, you don't see any Yelp links at all (since they requested Google to remove them) and you see no snippets from any other review sites. All you see are google's own reviews and then some links on the bottom showing show more reviews from other sites. This was changed - and I think it makes it worse for Yelp and other review sites - but they wanted it this way.