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

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

#61

Post by malchow »

ucaetano wrote: post #56
malchow wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is data stripping the new asset stripping?

Not really, data is replicable, assets aren't. So you can buy a company, strip all of its data, and resell for a similar value than you bought it for. You can't do that with asset stripping. But, on the other hand, if the data striping happens again and again, the company becomes worthless, even if it still has all of the assets and data. Ah, the wonders of the information economy...

Data is replicable, but any data set large enough to be globally useful has a time bounding function. A snapshot of the whole world today is worth less than perfect information just about how humans drive over 200 years / 1.752e+6 hours of observation. Don't you think?

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

#62

Post by paulgb »

timr wrote: post #40
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…

"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.

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

I wouldn't expect there to be a literal code switch that deletes bad reviews if someone pays for ads. But I can imagine a system developing naturally (even by accident!) where it's easier to get a human at Yelp to intervene when non-customers or bots left bad reviews.

Did Yelp have systems in place (e.g. a "Chinese wall") to prevent someone's status as a customer from impacting their ability to resolve a complaint about abusive negative reviews?

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

#63

Post by arkades »

buckhx wrote: post #32
ghaff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

I don’t know if this is applicable to a restaurant review guide, but:

I find The Wirecutter / Sweethome to be really great for consumer reviews. Specifically, because they’re transparent about the qualifications of the reviewer, and transparent about the criteria on which their subjects will be evaluated, including “we interviewed X, Y, Z and they identified a, b, c as the most important metrics because of R.” So I know why I should trust the author, their metric choices, and the results - which makes it easy for me to decide whether their judgment reflects my own priorities.

That seems like a lot more effort, in a distinct vein, than the usual restaurant review. Food is, of course, more subjective but the usual review seems like a highly evolved version of “I liked this.” I don’t care if a reviewer “likes this,” I want to know if they liked it —and- an indicator of how or why to generalize those results to my own tastes.

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

#64

Post by buckhx »

kolpa wrote: post #60
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

How does that sort of migration work, at a high level? Will Google run Zagat for you until you can operate it without depending on Google-internal components? Or do you have early-access to the system so you can build your port before the sale completes?

Google will run Zagat in prod for an agreed amount of time while we develop a separate platform that implements the same endpoints on our infrastructure. Once we're done with that, we'll switch client applications over to read from the new platform.

It's going to be a great challenge to tackle and I'd love to be able to share how it all went once the transition is complete.

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

#65

Post by arkades »

ghaff wrote: post #27
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…

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.

I find Yelp a very reliable source of tourist traps.

If you’re not in an area where that’s a risk, it’s not a good way to find -good- food, but it’s a good way to find the best local mainstream food. If the local mainstream best is mediocre... yeah, it’ll be 5 stars on yelp.

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

#66

Post by ucaetano »

malchow wrote: post #61
ucaetano wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, data is replicable, assets aren't. So you can buy a company, strip all of its data, and resell for a similar value than you bought it for. You can't do that with asset stripping. But, on the other hand, if the data striping happens again and again, the company becomes worthless, even if it still has all of the assets and data. Ah, the wonders of the information economy...

Data is replicable, but any data set large enough to be globally useful has a time bounding function. A snapshot of the whole world today is worth less than perfect information just about how humans drive over 200 years / 1.752e+6 hours of observation. Don't you think?

Sure. But that doesn't have anything to do with my comment.

As information goes, [A, B] is more valuable than [A], and the value of [A] declines with how many people/companies have A.

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

#67

Post by buckhx »

tmaly wrote: post #59
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

Will you continue to generate reviews in house, or do you have plans to engage a broader audience who will provide content? I have always felt the internet 1% rule to be extremely challenging in this respect. I took a stab with my food side project, but getting input has been quite a challenge.

The Infatuation will continue to write reviews and guides in house. We're looking to build a community to power the content on Zagat and curate content while we build that out. Building a community will definitely be a challenge, but hopefully we have a head start from the Zagat brand being so iconic in the space.

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

#68

Post by ghaff »

arkades wrote: post #63
buckhx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

I don’t know if this is applicable to a restaurant review guide, but: I find The Wirecutter / Sweethome to be really great for consumer reviews. Specifically, because they’re transparent about the qualifications of the reviewer, and transparent about the criteria on which their subjects will be evaluated, including “we interviewed X, Y, Z and they identified a, b, c as the most important metrics because of R.” So I k…

Wirecutter is excellent although, as you suggest, a restaurant is more subjective, has more dishes, has more variance in both the meals and service, etc. The Wirecutter is also pretty focused on identifying one item (with a couple alternatives) as the best choice. What I actually find they're the best for is when I just want to pick something and don't want to immerse myself in research. I find you won't go far wrong.

That said, better restaurant reviewers do try to explain what they liked or didn't like about a dish. But most people are not better restaurant reviewers, are often basing their opinion on just one visit, and are often writing short reviews that are in a different category from a New York Times reviewer writing an in-depth review after going to the restaurant three times.

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

#69

Post by alexbeloi »

buckhx wrote: post #42
whitepoplar wrote: post #36

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.

Our main source of revenue right now is through partnerships with brands who we see as sharing in our values. We have always believed that by providing quality content and by keeping our partnerships no bullsh*t and to brands that gel with us and that we believe our users will legitimately be interested in, our user base would remain loyal and interested in what we and our brand partners have to say. That model has w…

Is brand partner another word for advertiser/marketer?

I see a couple image ads on the reviews, but I doubt that brings in much revenue. So are doing things like product placement/mentions in-article?

I hope you don't accept money from anybody pushing you to review particular restaurants.

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

#70

Post by ghaff »

arkades wrote: post #65
ghaff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find Yelp a very reliable source of tourist traps. If you’re not in an area where that’s a risk, it’s not a good way to find -good- food, but it’s a good way to find the best local mainstream food. If the local mainstream best is mediocre... yeah, it’ll be 5 stars on yelp.

I don't really disagree with that. It's also a reasonably good way (most of the time) to avoid really bad choices. I certainly don't love Yelp but it's often better than alternatives when traveling. It's not like I find asking for recommendations at a hotel necessarily yields great results either.
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