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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

#91

Post by ghaff »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #82
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've been able to get some value out of Yelp reviews by using the the following guidelines: First and of course, look at the overall number of reviews and score as a rough guideline. You're probably not going to get burned going to a place with 700 reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Might not be as good as its reviews, but it's probably not crap. Second, ignore any review with the word "groupon" or "scoutmob" in it. For wh…

>pay special attention to the two and three star reviews.

I find that's often the case on Amazon as well. On your typical book review, say, there are a lot of 4s or 5s that are gushing praise because it's someone's favored author or genre or whatever. 1s tend to be "It sucked. Read 10 pages and threw it out."

2s and 3s as you say are more likely to be along the lines of "Really tried to like it because it had good ideas and I've liked author X in the past but this book was just too disjoined and confusing to recommend it."

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

#92

Post by timr »

majos wrote: post #58
timr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The evidence against Yelp seems to amount to a (from what I can tell sizeable) population of small business owners who claim that Yelp 1. is extremely aggressive about selling its advertising services (perhaps annoying, but not criminal) and 2. responds to failure to buy these services by filtering or deleting positive reviews. Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddi…

"Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least."

No, the "evidence" exists entirely in hearsay form. All you ever see are stories about parents, friends of friends, distant cousins, and so on. There's almost never so much as a link to the business page. Why? Because it's trivial to debunk these claims when you can see the reviews.

"It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation."

Not just silly, but absurd. It's internet conspiracy theory, and people are just thoughtlessly repeating it as fact.

"But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms."

If Yelp revealed how reviews are filtered, the filters would be rendered useless overnight. It would be the equivalent of Google publicly documenting their search algorithm. And while I think Yelp does many things badly when it comes to this stuff, they're 100% clear about how reviews and ads interact: they don't.

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

#93

Post by polishTar »

telltruth wrote: post #89

What's up with Google selling all these cool properties? Are they running out of money? :). More likely it's just management getting too short sighted for creative and quirky startups to thrive or even survive there. May be thanks to Ruthless Ruth and clueless Rosenstein blessed with penny pincher Page. I've heard stories about Boston Dynamics being treated with such a heavy hand to contribute to bottom line and give…

Google doesn't need (and shouldn't try) to do everything.

Google is much less of a "penny pincher" nowadays compared to when they were small and far too scrappy. Google R&D has increased by 233% in the last 5 years and has gone up even as a proportion of revenue (12.9% in FY13 vs 15.0% in FY17).

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

#94

Post by timr »

paulgb wrote: post #62
timr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 s…

Yes.

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

#95

Post by CoolGuySteve »

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

Can you fix the Android app, it crashes on launch every time on Android 8. I've never used it, ever.

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

#96

Post by tentakull »

I recently used the Infatuation, hopefully they can get a better breadth of reviewers and hopefully calibrate to your tastes i.e. pick a few restaurants that are 10 and calibrate to a reviewer from there.

For instance, the Slanted Door review by Max Child...mentions nothing of the history of the place and the head chef Charles Phan, instead commenting on "back in 1995, upscale Asian food in a shiny setting was a new and exciting concept, and these guys jumped on the opportunity" which is borderline offensive. Nor did it mention the fast-food side restaurant with great options. And the juvenile writing style was very off-putting. Disclaimer: I'm Viet and grew up near Little Saigon.

At least in SF I tried and uninstalled The Infatuation because it was dominated by this single reviewer that I disliked. Reviewer calibration would be absolutely killer if they could make it work.

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

#97

Post by z0r »

ghaff wrote: post #91
CommieBobDole wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been able to get some value out of Yelp reviews by using the the following guidelines: First and of course, look at the overall number of reviews and score as a rough guideline. You're probably not going to get burned going to a place with 700 reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Might not be as good as its reviews, but it's probably not crap. Second, ignore any review with the word "groupon" or "scoutmob" in it. For wh…

>pay special attention to the two and three star reviews. I find that's often the case on Amazon as well. On your typical book review, say, there are a lot of 4s or 5s that are gushing praise because it's someone's favored author or genre or whatever. 1s tend to be "It sucked. Read 10 pages and threw it out." 2s and 3s as you say are more likely to be along the lines of "Really tried to like it because it had good id…

I've found 1 star reviews to be hugely useful on Amazon. Often have seen detailed contrarian 1 star reviews for books that have nearly a 5 star average and found very interesting viewpoints. This works especially well when you're suspicious of the product being a scam - less the case for books, but very useful for other consumer products. The 1 star reviews are where people who received a cheap knock off or something that broke or otherwise failed quickly complain. I like to read the 2 and 3 star reviews as well but there's a similar amount of filtering necessary in my experience.

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

#98

Post by forkandwait »

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…

Probably you meant "conscious" not "conscience".

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/conscien...

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

#100

Post by joering2 »

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…

Thanks for doing this. Could you share some interesting facts behind the scene of deal maiking? Did you approach google or the other way around?

I'm very interested how this works. I know someone at the big telco company I can't tell name here that was approached about years ago by Google in terms of selling of gmail. But the deal eventually fell between cracks as the price Google wanted for just mailboxes was too big.

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