Both Angie's List and Yelp offer user-generated reviews, but there's a key difference. Yelp had 61 million unique visitors as of the end of Q3 2011 and 22.4 million reviews. Angie's List is much smaller, but it has more than one million paying members.

Angie's List is focused on consumer reviews for home and service providers. The majority of Yelp's reviews are for shopping and restaurants. The two companies are not actually direct competitors. Here's a breakdown of Yelp's review types from its S-1 filing.

Angie's List focuses on home and local services, auto and health, which only make up 19% of Yelp's reviews.

Compared to Groupon's flashy daily deals and blinged out cat, Angie's List feels pretty boring. Nothing is delivered daily. And more importantly, there is no cat. Plus, Angie's List began in 1995, and is not part of a consumer's daily experience. The year 2010 brought a $27.2 million net loss on sales of $59 million. In the first nine months of 2011, it did bring in $62.6 million, but it still lost $43.2 million.

Angie's List didn't begin as a tech start-up. It started as a phone-in service, and went to the Web in 1999. Angie's List offers free memberships to attract new users and reviews, and then, after two years of membership, that market converts to a paid member-base and Angie's List cashes in. The site passed the one million membership mark in October 2011.

Consumers value things they pay for. Angie's List members pay for their content. Yelp's unique visitors and review writers do not. Angie isn't the cool kid in the room, but her paid membership business model might just work.

These new features push forward Google's efforts to be a one-stop-shop for mobile, location-based searches. From finding the restaurant to walking in the door, Google is building applications to compel smartphone users to use Google and only Google to find, shop and eat at local businesses.

In July, Google Places made its move and started pushing Yelp around on Google search result pages for restaurants and businesses, which feed into Yelp's core business. In September, the CEO of Yelp testified before the Senate that Google's practices around local businesses are anti-competitive.

Chairman Eric Schmidt replied that Google has plenty of competition, including from Yelp, thanks to its partnership with Apple. Siri, the new AI voice assistant on the iPhone 4S, bypasses Google for searches for local businesses, going straight to Yelp results. Apple is also buying companies who compete with other aspects of Google's local search business, including 3D mapping companies.

In the meantime, Google has acquired Zagat, publisher of restaurant reviews, in order to shore up the quality of its local business content. It has also seized control of the content of local business listings to ensure the quality of its search results.

What Web services do you use to find stuff to do in your area?

Google touts this as a convenience and points out that a business owner can quickly log in from the email and correct any erroneous changes. But this is sort of a strange update. Google Places listings are an important way for businesses to be discovered from Web search, and business owners might not be partial to those listings updating without their expressed consent. Then again, some might feel that maintaining Google listings is a hassle, and this update will save them the effort.

This update indicates that Google needs tighter control over the information in its business listings. It's hard to spin an update that takes control out of business owners' hands as a good thing. Local businesses are an important strategic part of Google's expansions into local and mobile revenue streams, and imposing automatic updates on those listings is an aggressive play.

It's worth noting that this part of Google's business is under scrutiny for anti-competitive practices. Yelp, Google's most celebrated competitor in local business listings, testified in Washington against Google for scraping Yelp's content for its own purposes and pushing Yelp results out of the way.

Google is pushing hard to control this market. It bought Zagat to get better content about local businesses, it bought Dealmap to push against Groupon on local deals, and it's using Android to close the loop and get businesses on board with Google Wallet NFC payments.

What's the rush? Well, Google rules search for now, but Apple just shipped a record number of iPhones loaded with an artificially intelligent search assistant called Siri. Location - and thus mobile devices - is an essential part of connecting consumers to local businesses, and Siri is the most convenient way to make that connection on the new iPhone. Guess what: Siri uses Yelp.

Are you a business owner? What do you think of the change? Does it make your life easier, or would you prefer to have control?

In July, Google made its move in local business reviews, pushing results from sites like Yelp down the page below reviews from Google's own Places service. The accusation is that Google's search privileges its own content (and ad businesses) ahead of competitors. These allegations have arisen before in both the U.S. and Europe. But are these practices really anti-competitive under the law?

Independent analysis has shown that Google's efforts to integrate all kinds of content searches has benefitted its Web properties, especially when it comes to images and videos. But Google insists that these are natural results based only on user preferences. It's not surprising, after all, that YouTube is the top website for video search results, regardless of whether Google owns it.

But practices like pushing other business review sites off of its Places pages are more deliberate. Google would be hard-pressed to construe that as an effort to serve user preferences. Places pages used to scrape content from those sites and display it on a Google page, but Google discontinued that practice. But recently, Google addressed the need to scrape content by acquiring restaurant review publisher Zagat. Moving into this content space will further bolster Google's efforts to crush Yelp.

Google faces plenty of competition in other aspects of its business related to local business, such as deals and payments. But Places pages are no longer neutral ground, and if the launch of Google Flight Search is any indication, the travel industry could be next.

Our own Scott M. Fulton, III will be covering Wednesday's Senate hearing in detail, so stay tuned.

Do you think Google's search business is anti-competitive? Speak your mind in the comments.

Food nerds are often even more proud of the food they make at home than what they find around town to eat - but most food photo and review services don't support home cooked food posted without a publicly visible location. Now Nosh users looking for nearby food won't see the enchiladas that came out of your oven and come knock on your door - but your friends on the network will see them in their stream of updates from contacts.

The home food photos is particularly exciting though. Almost every social network on earth could use an improved understanding of the difference between home and other locations. Failure to respect location privacy at home can spoil a person's willingness to expose location data anywhere else, too. Flickr came up with a very interesting way to handle that division last week.

Aren't there already a lot of food photo apps in the world, I asked Craig Walker? Why start another one? Walker said that Nosh's approach is different, but that this is also just how startups work.

"GrandCentral was the 15th solution like it and everybody asked why we'd be successful when previous efforts weren't - but we were," he said. "If it's a good idea there will always be more than one person working on it. I've never been too worried about that."

The home photos and the web posting both indicate to me that there are likely plenty of different ways that apps in this space could continue to innovate through competition. That sounds like good news for all of us who love to use our mobile devices to more intelligently engage with the offline world and its food.

In other words, show me a coffee shop that's close to me and open now. The addition of these features to the Google Places helps bring its app to feature parity with Yelp's iPhone app. You'll need to download an update to the app to see the new features.

That said, I use the Google Places app on my iPhone whenever I want to look up anything but restaurants. I still prefer Yelp for restaurants because I think there are more, longer and better reviews posted. But if I'm looking for a convenience store, bar, park or other type of Place - I really like what Google is doing. The ability to filter for businesses open now sounds pretty sweet.

Yelp location pages are rich in information, and reviews and quick tips from members help keep them up to date and relevant. This makes Yelp a valuable, searchable tool for discovering new places and keeping up with the ones you like. Foursquare's new feature will attack this by allowing any brand to crank out a steady stream of content, which followers can also share, making places on Foursquare a bit stickier, since they can publish more reminders.

Check out Foursquare's new Page Gallery for examples.

For now, sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, JudysBook or Europe's Qype will be linked-to at the bottom of a list of Google Places reviews. (Sometimes they appear at the top.) This seems to me like the kind of thing that could be discussed in an examination of potentially monopolistic business practices. Independent review sites have had to know, though, that the company that delivered them up in search results for so long would be tempted to just create its own content and keep review searchers on Google's own sites. Google Places is a very compelling service for users, too.

Google says that in the long run, it hopes to make writing and posting reviews even faster and easier (it's quite easy already, the Google Places iPhone app for example is a model of usability), it hopes to take those Google Places reviews and display them all over the rest of Google sites and services where they might be useful and it hopes to serve up more personalized content - like reviews of places written by people you know. Perhaps people in your "inner Circles?"

There are a lot of different ways to look at this change, including from the perspective of small businesspeople and the tech consultants that serve them.

"Jeez - Can't these guys knock it off with the changes already?" asked Search Engine Consultant Dev Basu today in comments on a hotly discussed post by Google Maps and Search consultant Mike Blumenthal. "I spent the better half of last year educating clients in hotel and hospitality verticals to not put all their eggs in Google reviews. Instead, we decided to run Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Hotels.com programs to incent reviews."

Blumenthal argued, though, that Google still links to other review sites and presumably will still surface them in search. Thus he argues that the best practice for local businesses remain the same: to cultivate reviews on 3 independent sites in addition to Google Places.

We'll see how things look in the future. Google Places is a great service, but competition between multiple innovators is ultimately better.

Update: A Google spokesperson emailed to provide the following feedback (sometimes they are very nice, I swear) "the headline, second paragraph and overall suggestion about why we made today's changes is inaccurate.

So, readers, apparently Google would like you to know that they did not put excerpts from their own reviews on Places pages, remove excerpts from other sites' reviews and leave only one line of links to 3rd party sites because they wanted visitors to remain on Google sites instead of going elsewhere. Regardless of the intention, I suspect you'll agree with me what the most likely consequences are.

A judge has thrown out a lawsuit accusing local business review site Yelp of extortion. The lawsuit made a number of allegations against Yelp, accusing it of acting in a way that added up to "implied extortion," wherein businesses were said to be treated differently on the site according to whether or not they advertised with Yelp.

Today, a judge dismissed the lawsuit on a number of grounds, including that some allegations were "entirely speculative."

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel's dismissed the case, writing "this case is nothing more than an improper attempt to stifle consumer opinions about Plaintiff's businesses and defeat the broad immunity afforded to online services like Yelp's that provide a forum for protected consumer speech."

Goldman says that Judge Patel breaks down the complaint into four groups - that Yelp removed positive reviews after the plaintiff declined to purchase ads, that Yelp kept reviews in violation of its TOS, manufactured its own negative reviews and that it told the plaintiff that paying for ads would improve its rating on the site.

The judge decided that several of these complains were "entirely speculative." On the second allegation - that Yelp maintained negative reviews in spite of its TOS - Judge Patel writes that "Yelp cannot be held liable on a theory that it extorted plaintiffs by refusing to de-publish negative business reviews."

If the plaintiff can add more details to convince the judge that their complaints have merit, however, the case could feasibly move on from there.

"But that is not an option for us...we get a large volume of our traffic via Google search," said Stoppelman, apparently ungrateful for what he must consider a Natural Right, to have his information organized ala Google at no cost. "We just don't get any value out of our reviews appearing on Google Places and haven't been given an option other than to remove ourselves from search..." I'm not buying it and here's why.

Well boo-hoo for you then, over this whole Google Places thing. Just how bad is it? Google Places is hardly a Google map covered in Yelp reviews - in fact, the site only excerpts the first 3 lines of two Yelp reviews! Along with 4 other sources of reviews (CitySearch, etc.) and Google's own user reviews. Yelp is on the top of the list, too. Google Places could probably do just fine without it.

This reminds me of newspaper sites complaining about the millions of readers aggregators like the Huffington Post send them, based on short excerpts of their articles. Except Yelp isn't hurting like newspapers are. Yelp is doing really well, in large part because of Google's free search traffic.

Yelp may have reason to be concerned about Google Places (with Hotpot!) - especially given the advertising blitz Google has behind it. But it's legitimate competition Yelp has to fear, not a little light aggregation. That's my take on it. Maybe there are fine-grained details I'm not taking into account. Maybe this is about cross-industry monopolistic practices, I don't know. Google's take it or leave it perspective doesn't seem unreasonable to me in this case, though.

Google Places is a good, fast way to start looking for reviews of nearby restaurants but it doesn't offer the depth of the sites it aggregates. In the end, millions of us will keep going to Yelp for the in-depth reviews of restaurants written from the perspective of the unique Yelp culture: typically young, urban socialites who feel entitled to pass judgement on small businesses. Maybe the corporate attitude just comes along with that culture.

Twitter is a remarkably easy way for small business owners to use SMS or Facebook to publish their specials, event promotions and other information that makes it easier to identify spots that you might want to patronize. BarBird is like a geo-aware, semantically smart, venue-update browser on your phone. I like it. It's been fun to test so far.

Hopefully more kinds of filters will be made available in the future. I'd love to be able to view Tweets near me concerning particularly exciting meals. I'm really into hyper-local news, as well as food and drink - so this seems just like a little neighborhood newswire and real-time guide to me.

You can also view the updates in list form and the app makes it easy to access all a venue's Tweets, their Google Places information and reviews (look out, Yelp) and get directions to the venue.

Saying these kinds of combo-apps are more appealing than Yelp is no exaggeration. It's one thing to read long-form reviews of a restaurant, it's another to be able to read tonight's updates from a bar that posted by SMS or Twitter app. This combination of technologies really lowers the barrier to publishing updates for small businesses.

Of course all of this presumes that small businesses will use Twitter. If they get results, presumably they will. Apps like BarBird, or integration of this kind of feature into other apps, could help make that more realistic.

Building the Listings

How did BarBird index 10,000 venues from 44 US cities and 6 cities outside the US? That's an interesting part of the story as well. Co-founder Pierce Lamb says that craftiness went a long way.

The company was able to build such a large data set so quickly by leveraging user-generated categorization on Twitter, in the form of Twitter Lists that users curated for their own uses on Twitter. By finding collections of Twitter accounts labeled with titles like "Portland bars," (or whatever the city might be) BarBird was able to collect a large number of likely topical Twitter accounts at least ostensibly connected to a type of business. The team then queried Google Maps to see if each Twitter username captured returned a street adress; if it did not, then it was tossed out.

The self-funded team plans to offer venue owners a free analytics package and rely on advertisements as their business model. The nice thing about BarBird is that the Tweets are already out there - this app just finds them and organizes them in a relavant context.

You can, of course, still search for local businesses and view the results as a list or on a map. But the iPad app adds the option to view the results as a grid of photos. As the success of the food recommendation service Foodspotting has shown, photos - particularly at restaurants - can be a huge factor in making a decision on where to go, and by featuring the photos perhaps both users and businesses will feel more compelled to share more pictures on Yelp.

The iPad app also lets you write reviews, something you can't do on the iPhone version. (You can write a draft review, but you have to visit the Yelp website to post it.) To be sure, Yelp is still very much focused on reviews, and the company on track to have over 15 million reviews on its site, with more than 6 million added this year alone.

Location's popularity this year, and the rush of other companies - both startups like Foodspotting and giants like Google - to move into this local search and recommendation space, doesn't seem to have hurt Yelp. It says it's grown by 50% this year. Only a small portion of those users use Yelp on their mobile devices - 2.6 million monthly users on mobile versus 39 million on the web. But the iPad app may help more into that mobile category - provided, I suppose, you see the iPad as a mobile device.

Your recommendations will be visible when you use Google's Place Search and will also appear on Maps.

While the Google versus Facebook battle seems to be getting a lot of attention, Hotpot may well have more effect against Yelp, the site long associated with local reviews and recommendations. Google has over 50 million places already, linked to maps and reviews (many of them Yelp reviews).

By moving the recommendation and review process "in house," so to speak, by being able to provide an algorithm to recommend sites based on preferences, not merely location, and most importantly perhaps, by integrating these recommendations with mobile, Maps and Search, Google's Hotpot may be a "killer" location-based app. Sorry, Yelp.

Now, Yelp is introducing Check-in Offers later this month, a feature that will give users real-life discounts and deals when they check-in to locations and it appears the company is following in Foursquares' footsteps again - but is it?

Yelp, on the other hand, has long been in the game of local business reviews by community members. That's been its primary product all along. Check-ins, for Yelp, were more of a community building feature, something to keep users interested and interacting. As the company writes in yesterday's blog post announcing the feature, "Yelp is a transactional website, and upcoming features like Check-in Offers help to further bridge online discovery and offline buying. In other words no one types "Sushi" near "Los Angeles" for fun."

So, sure, Yelp may be literally following in Foursquare's footsteps with a similar feature, but it means something completely different in this context. Foursquare may offer "tips", but those same tips are the reviews at the very core of Yelp and it's why users go there.

We got a chance to speak with Stephanie Ichinose, the senior director of communications at Yelp, and she told us that mobile accounted for around 30% of Yelp's searches and that the site had just hit 14 million reviews over the weekend.

"It's an obvious and pretty natural extension," said Ichinose. "It absolutely makes sense for us to layer it in as a way business owners can communicate with their users."

And that might be the key difference here - at the heart of Yelp are businesses and those 14 million user-submitted reviews of those businesses. At the heart of Foursquare are locations of many kinds - businesses, hangout spots, random peoples' houses - some with reviews (or "tips") and some without.

Would these sorts of check-in deals bring you over from Foursquare to Yelp? Or is the user experience with Foursquare strong enough to keep you going, with the occasional deal or mayoral discount? Let us know if you think Yelp's implementation makes more sense or if it just works better with Foursquare in the comments below.

The new feature will enter Yelp into a growing market of local-deal providers, with companies like Groupon and LivingSocial, by offering deals to what Yelp users spend most of their time looking for - local businesses.

Looking at the deal highlighted in today's post, we can garner a few more details.

It looks like the deals will be limited-time offerings, as a counter sits at the top of the screen counting down how long it will last. The coupon is available for purchase directly from Yelp and the deal can be redeemed by printing out or showing your confirmation on your phone to the business.

What is unclear, however, is whether or not this will be a feature that will be available for purchase directly from the Yelp app on your smartphone. If I'm in downtown San Diego and I'm looking for a good coffee shop, will I see a deal such as this appear or do I need to search from home to find the deal?'

Right now, it looks like the feature will only be available from the Web and the payment page only showed the ability to pay with a credit card, not PayPal or any other online payment system.