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

#31

Post by drb91 » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:53 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…

You can’t go by the calculated review number; you should read the reviews (which it seems like you already do on other sites.) I would focus on the individual reviews and ignore the aggregate entirely.

It would also be nice if you could rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately. But you can’t, so it’s meaningless.

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

#32

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #21

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…

I fully support snob-mentality and am onboard with your take on most UGC. It's something we are going to be very conscience about as we grow the platform. In general, want to take a top-down approach by identifying quality contributors (probably power users of The Infatuation) to seed the platform with. When interviewing users about problems with UGC, the first answer is almost always that they don't know who the person is and don't know why they should trust them. Want to combat that out of the gate.

Tim & Nina actually took the same approach originally by sending surveys out to people they thought would have valuable opinions and rewarding them with a printed guide.

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

#33

Post by chatmasta » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

sf_rob wrote: post #28

chatmasta wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean in practice they can get away with it. As of now, there are no audit trails required for training of machine learning algorithms.

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

#34

Post by jonknee » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:55 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.

That was 7 years ago...

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

#35

Post by jonknee » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:56 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

Was Zagat being shopped around, or did you go looking for it specifically?

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

#36

Post by whitepoplar » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

Question: How does the Infatuation make money? I see they've only raised $3.5mm in seed funding, but over the last few years, they've been blowing up the restaurant review industry.

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

#37

Post by ghaff » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

drb91 wrote: post #31

majos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can’t go by the calculated review number; you should read the reviews (which it seems like you already do on other sites.) I would focus on the individual reviews and ignore the aggregate entirely. It would also be nice if you could rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately. But you can’t, so it’s meaningless.

>rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately

Which is what Zagat was like initially.

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

#38

Post by buckhx » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:00 PM UTC

got2surf wrote: post #29

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.

Our take right now is that The Infatuation will focus on subjective takes with our reviews and guides and Zagat will be more data driven from the community. That being said, we're going to have to be pragmatic through this.

Would love to hear some of the feedback you've heard about review sites in general.

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

#39

Post by nix0n » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:00 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.

Yelp's reviews are probably real, but Yelp also throws out a lot of real reviews, and they do this in a way that will skew the star rating up or down depending on whether the business purchases Yelp ads.

Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.

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

#40

Post by timr » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:01 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…

"Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up."

No, they don't. This is a rumor that is often repeated, but is never backed with evidence that goes beyond hearsay.

Also, I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.