When we rolled out hover2 in production it looked significantly different from Google, so we were concerned that we might lose the lift. But we didn't. So we chalked the lift up to the hover UX paradigm rather than the visual similarity to Google.
Cool, thanks for the info and the reply. I think there may be something to that type of design for comparing locations vs listings, it is similar to what sites like airbnb use. I generally like to think that those types of sites have done the testing already and came to that design (or stuck with it) for a reason.
