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

#21

Post by ghaff » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:47 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

Question/comment. One thing that was good about Zagat was that, at the risk of being snobby, it seemed to often have a better class of user-generated content than many other sites. It was curated to some degree of course. And, especially the the paper survey days, I expect the barrier to entry filtered out a lot of people who were presumably less interested in food generally.

Have you thought about this kind of thing and the type of user participation that you'll encourage?

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

#22

Post by chatmasta » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

buckhx wrote: post #19

prepend wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious, did you have to sign any sort of anti-trust paperwork acknowledging that Google will not grant you preferred spots in listings?

Is Google able to give your content preferential treatment in its index?

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

#23

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

puzzle wrote: post #17

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.

They're out living their best life right now. We'll have a relationship with them, but right now they don't have formal roles with us. We had a good chat with them a couple weeks ago about the technology side of things and they definitely have a great perspective on things.

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

#24

Post by lacker » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:49 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…

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.

Buying Zagat seemed like it was Marissa Mayer's project, so when she left it is possible there was no longer a real champion of the Zagat acquisition left at Google.

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

#25

Post by aphextron » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #18

aphextron wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.

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

#26

Post by lod723 » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

buckhx wrote: post #13

aphextron wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That didn't answer the question.

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

#27

Post by ghaff » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #18

aphextron wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I put Yelp in the category of often (maybe even usually) better than sticking a finger on the map. Or just finding some minimally acceptable place. But, I agree that it's not great and, for me at least, a lot of reviewers seem to have very different priorities than I do and there often do seem to be a lot of weird complaints.

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

#28

Post by sf_rob » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #20

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.

Publishing something does not make it public domain. I am not a lawyer, but saying they can do anything with what they scrape seems questionable.

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

#29

Post by got2surf » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:52 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

Congratulations! This looks like a great purchase, especially for the brand value of Zagat.

Do you see The Infatuation continuing to focus on reviews, or adding in more analytics a la Medallia or Revinate? We do customer feedback analysis and have a few clients in the restaurant space - it's always interesting to hear about what value-adds review sites can have.

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

#30

Post by djtriptych » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

Pretty cool. I always suspected Google really bought Zagat in the first place because it was easier than evicting them from 111 8th, Google's NYC HQ. Zagat was a tenant when Google bought that building a few years back.

Spotify was too. Wonder if there were ever talks of a buyout.