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

nytimes.com

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

#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

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

#4
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

Hello !

Congratulations on the acquisition !

Any chance you can elucidate on what - 'user-generated-content counterpart to The Infatuation' is going to be ? - what challenges do you foresee on extracting the google tech out ?

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

#5
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

Hey - congrats on the fun work ahead. Can you share any details about the challenges you're expecting?

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

#6
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.

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

#7

Woah this is really cool! I'm a huge fan of The Infatuation. It's solving a really important need on the internet - quality reviews from trusted sources that you actually want to read.

Hopeful for this. Google seemed to leave Zagat to wither at first. They eventually did fix some things but it clearly hasn't been getting a lot of TLC. I usually find Zagat more concise and reliable than other sites. I'm probably a better match for their historical demographic from the guidebook days than Yelp, etc.

Wasn't aware of The Infatuation. Will have to check out.

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

#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 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.

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

#9
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

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?

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

#10
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…

Is data stripping the new asset stripping?
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