Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#11

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

sunsetMurk wrote: post #5

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

Hey - congrats on the fun work ahead. Can you share any details about the challenges you're expecting?

We have an aggressive timeline to extract Zagat from Google. We're still going to leverage a number of their technologies (GCP, Go, Protobufs, etc..), but we basically need to re-implement their platform on infrastructure we own. Going to take notes along the way and be able to s hare how the process went when the transition is over.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#12

Post by prepend » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

malchow wrote: post #10

prepend wrote: post #8

This is interesting. What’s the data use agreement like on this sale? Does google get to retain all of Zagat’s historical data? Or is it sold to the Infatuation? They just bought Zagat in 2011, so selling it so quickly seems odd. It’s an undisclosed amount, so I assume it’s at a loss from its $151M purchase. I hope it eventually becomes public knowledge through Google’s SEC filings. If this is just a way to buy deep…

Is data stripping the new asset stripping?

It would explain a lot.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#13

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #6

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

What precisely are you guys doing to ensure review authenticity? This is the number one reason I ignore all reviews all the internet but Yelp.

On The Infatuation we have staff writers visit a restaurant multiple times and make sure we have our opinion has been as informed as possible. Our biggest problem is scaling that process and we want to use Zagat to help with that via user generated content. We want to take learnings from other UGC platforms to inform the direction we take with Zagat and a big piece of that is authenticity.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#14

Post by koolba » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #8

This is interesting. What’s the data use agreement like on this sale? Does google get to retain all of Zagat’s historical data? Or is it sold to the Infatuation? They just bought Zagat in 2011, so selling it so quickly seems odd. It’s an undisclosed amount, so I assume it’s at a loss from its $151M purchase. I hope it eventually becomes public knowledge through Google’s SEC filings. If this is just a way to buy deep…

> If this is just a way to buy deep data sets, then this makes sense. $150M for likely the best training set for food review in existence makes sense and therefore isn’t Google stupidly investing in review sites. It would also explain the buy and sell technique used on Boston Dynamics, Moto, and others.

It'd only make sense if they couldn't acquire the data set directly for less than the price difference and transaction. An M&A deal for Google isn't cheap and comes with a lot of oversight, risk, and scrutiny.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#15

Post by magnetic » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #6

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

What precisely are you guys doing to ensure review authenticity? This is the number one reason I ignore all reviews all the internet but Yelp.

What is it about Yelp that makes you trust them?

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#16

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

gapo wrote: post #4

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

Hello ! Congratulations on the acquisition ! Any chance you can elucidate on what - 'user-generated-content counterpart to The Infatuation' is going to be ? - what challenges do you foresee on extracting the google tech out ?

Thanks! Zagat really was the OG user generated content platform. They distributed surveys out and used the responses to form their short iconic reviews. We want to bring Zagat back to it's roots, but powered with modern technology to make that happen.

Decoupling Google is going to be a big challenge for sure. Luckily, we have good experience around most of the technologies involved. The biggest challenge will probably be around finding proxy data/tech for things that only exist internal to Google. They obviously have an incredibly rich dataset to build off of and we'll need to find a way to deal with not having that.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#17

Post by puzzle » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

Are Tim and Nina Zagat part of the deal? They were still at Google when I left, but they are approaching their 80s now.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#18

Post by majos » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #6

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

What precisely are you guys doing to ensure review authenticity? This is the number one reason I ignore all reviews all the internet but Yelp.

Really? I find even Yelp reviews low quality in general, so I use older methods (food forums like Chowhound or eGullet, some bloggers I'm familiar with, sometimes even newspaper critics) to find restaurants.

Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher.

Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#19

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #9

buckhx wrote: post #2

CTO of The Infatuation here. We're excited to get rolling on this and have some really unique challenges ahead to extract Zagat from internal Google technology. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers

This is neat and looking forward to your updates with Zagat. Do you have any ongoing data relationships with Google regarding Zagat? Did your acquisition include data ownership of all the Zagat data and information?

Yeah we're getting all of the Zagat specific content, but there is loads of Google data that we won't have access to moving forward.

We'll continue to have a symbiotic relationship with Google from a data/content perspective, but being an external entity will limit us in some capacities.

Re: Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

#20

Post by chatmasta » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #8

This is interesting. What’s the data use agreement like on this sale? Does google get to retain all of Zagat’s historical data? Or is it sold to the Infatuation? They just bought Zagat in 2011, so selling it so quickly seems odd. It’s an undisclosed amount, so I assume it’s at a loss from its $151M purchase. I hope it eventually becomes public knowledge through Google’s SEC filings. If this is just a way to buy deep…

If they are using the data internally (e.g. for ML training), they can get away with not buying it. They already scrape every website in existence and feed their data to ML training algorithms, it's not like Google needs to pay for a data set just to use it internally.