Searching for a hotel this week, I kept seeing a feature pop up that we’ve written about a little bit in the past.

If you haven’t experienced it before, there’s a small prompt to users, asking “Know what features this place has?” Once clicking (or tapping) in, you’re prompted with questions about the property. The questions appear to mostly cover topics like ambiance and atmosphere.

It looks like Google is crowdsourcing data from users to help in the search and consideration process. From the user perspective I’ve really appreciated this data… it is a quick way to review a lot of details without having to dig into review after review.

This was an actual search of mine. I have two young children, so I am more than likely not going to need a hotel that is “lively” or good for “nightlife.” I want a hotel that is “quiet” and “has no nightlife that will wake up my (hopefully) sleeping children.”

But I digress.

After clicking on the prompt, you can see options to select predetermined keywords to upvote or downvote a feature. You can select it you agree or deselect it to disagree. Notice that there are three sections here.

The first is Crowd, asking the users [Is this hotel] “Good for kids?”. So far, this is the only option for this category that I have seen.

The second is Highlights, asking if you agree with “Great View”. This is also the only option.

Third, Atmosphere, “How does it feel?”.

Google appears to be looking for less tangible qualities of a hotel that are not related to amenities, like swimming pool or free wifi. Instead, they are focusing on characteristics typically known by locals or only found reading through a lot of very lengthy reviews.

I am looking forward to being able to query for “kid friendly hotels in Dallas with great views” and seeing a short list of incredibly relevant hotels.

This approach will help travelers find the hotel they need quickly by associating keyword features to particular hotels. Google is continuing to focus on the end-user experience and as most crowdsourcing goes, this will only get better. It will be interesting to see what Google will add and how they prioritize the feedback keywords as more options are unveiled in the future.