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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

#71

Post by L_Rahman »

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…

'Sometimes even newspaper critics' - oh man this is harsh. I don't like the biases that newspaper critics tend to have but Pete Wells and Ruth Reichl at the Times, Sietsema (previously at the Village Voice, now at Eater) all do excellent reporting.

But I agree that it all pales in comparison to amateur enthusiast communities and specialist blogs.

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

#72

Post by buckhx »

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…

We love The Wirecutter and is something we look to a lot from The Infatuation. Their content is fairly "evergreen" and useful. They cover utility aspects great, but generally feel like they don't take design/taste/style into account. That might be that subjective vs. objective nature of reviews that you're alluding to and why their reviews are so effective b/c they take a very objective approach.

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

#73

Post by stingraycharles »

buckhx wrote: post #64
kolpa wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that mean you're going to do a rewrite ? If so, how do these costs compare to the total acquisition costs ?

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

#74

Post by foobaw »

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 do you think about Yelp?

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

#75

Post by buckhx »

stingraycharles wrote: post #73
buckhx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that mean you're going to do a rewrite ? If so, how do these costs compare to the total acquisition costs ?

It's not a full-blown rewrite, but it's not just spin up new infrastructure and run it over here either. We're receiving Zagat specific code, but there are significant gaps from missing Google dependencies and data that need to be filled.

The transition costs aren't negligible by any means, but are worth the opportunity.

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

#77

Post by onetimemanytime »

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

I am sure you could have gotten it for cheaper. But, hey you had the money and secured it.

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

#78

Post by prepend »

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.

Zagat likely had much more data than what was publicly available. I have no visibility, but can imagine non-public data useful for training like individual reviewer biases, reviews through their edit lifecycle, stuff like that.

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

#79

Post by rz2k »

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.

Do you have a specific market of consumers you want to target?

A while ago there was large thread on Reddit asking anyone who had eaten at the Olive Garden in Times Square, why[1] they had chosen to eat there. There were people who thought it was one of the funniest questions that they'd ever read on /r/askreddit, and people who didn't understand why it was an interesting or funny question.

Byant Park Grill is a nearby restaurant that is not a tiny hole in the wall, and the dishes are not that exotic. For context, here are two dishes that are on today's menu at the different restaurants:

- Bryant Park Grill[2]

$28.50 - Grilled Soy Honey Glazed Atlantic Salmon

"stir fried broccoli, snow peas, carrots, roasted potatoes, soy ginger butter sauce"

- Olive Garden Times Square

$27.79 - Salmon Piccata[3]

"Grilled salmon topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Served with parmesan-crusted zucchini"

The prices are not extremely different, the wait times are similar if you show up at the door, and it would be naïve to think that Olive Garden hasn't put a lot of thought and research into exactly how they make their food. I wouldn't be surprised if the diners at Bryant Park Grill are even disappointed in their meals more often than the diners at Olive Garden, but I suppose they also think something is above average more often at Bryant Park Grill and occasionally excellent.

The same people at Bryant Park Grill might go to Olive Garden, but it is to bring a group of their summer interns for a celebration or maybe when dining out with elderly family members. When they travel with their own families, they avoid chain restaurants and look for either a generic diner, or a restaurant that has been recommended verbally by a local or someone working at the desk at a hotel.

How do people who consider something like the Bryant Park Grill a large restaurant with a safe, but not exceptional menu quickly find the equivalent somewhere like Palo Alto? I feel like asking a dozen people between 30 and 60 would find them all suggesting the same two or three restaurants, but review sites never seem to be able to do this. Instead, sites like Yelp seem to have a lot of reviewers who are talking about themselves as tastemakers, who pride themselves on discovering secret gems, and being offended by something weird at places that have favorable word-of-mouth reputations.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors... [2] http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ [3] https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028

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

#80

Post by prepend »

koolba wrote: post #14
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 transact…

In some situations data can not be sold if the privacy policy only allows internal use. For example, gmail doesn’t allow my mail to be sold or loaned to anyone, but google can access the data to show ads and for quality control. (See https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse)

Google is unlikely to be purchased. But if the NSA bought google, then it could use my gmail data -per the privacy agreement that I agreed to- “services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content.”

This is only possible if the organization is purchased.

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