Google Is Selling Off Zagat (techcrunch.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Seven years after picking up Zagat for $151 million, Google is selling off the perennial restaurant recommendation service. The New York Times is reporting this morning that the technology giant is selling off the company to The Infatuation, a review site founded nine years back by former music execs. The company had been rumored to be courting a buyer since early this year. As Reuters noted at the time, Zagat has increasingly become less of a focus for Google, as the company began growing its database of restaurant recommendations organically. Zagat, meanwhile, has lost much of the shine it had when Google purchased it nearly a decade ago. The Infatuation, which uses an in-house team of reviewers to write up restaurants in major cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London, is picking up the service for an undisclosed amount. The site clearly believes there's value left in the Zagat brand, even as the business of online reviews has changed significantly in the seven years sinceGoogle picked it up.
Yep. (Score:2)
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Or maybe he doesn't live in the USA? I've never heard of Zagat either.
I remember (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember buying the red Zagat booklets for various cities in order to find good restaurants while traveling. Unfortunately, Google made it almost useless. I never could find anything in their web site. The app is useless, too. I rarely found a dud with the old books, almost anything rated as excellent was. There is really nothing like it now. Yelp's reviews and ratings seem to be totally random and usually Google doesn't have enough places or enough reviews. Rating Chic-fil-a the same as some fancy steak place is not useful. One is clearly a better dining experience, but you can't really tell from the ratings. That's why Zagat rated food, ambiance and service separately. Hopefully the new overlords can make it great again.
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Google made it almost useless
Yeah they tend to do that. DejaNews was once a great Usenet resource for the web. There were Usenet threads pre-Eternal September that were useful to keep archived. Google merged it into Groups, torched the interface several times, then made it nearly unsearchable. It's a complete mess now.
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Holy shit. I just realized Reddit is pretty much Usenet, but with fancy pictures via html, and centrally managed.
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Yeah, Zagat was never a good fit for Google, because Zagat was a curated list of reviews which delved into such things. I remember thinking when they got bought that it was going to ruin Zagat.
Google et al just want as many reviews as possible so you go there first, and there's almost no way to make any meaningful decisions about the information ... OK, so 500 people rated McDonald's high, but
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At least with Zagat you could know it was adults, who could afford a sit down dinner, and weren't there to advance their personal agenda. With online reviews, you should assume none of those things.
I agree, but that may also have been due to the time when it started. The Internet wasn't really as widely used by the idiot activists. By forcing people to pay actual money for the reviews, you really did cut down on the morons. Perhaps they can bring that back. I'd still pay for good reviews.
People around where I live apparently have no taste. Most of the highly rated places are like 80 years old and serving food from cans, yet are rated 4.5 stars. I've been eating out enough that I can often read the men
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Why would you need a guide for buying a specific brand of tires?
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Sears Roebuck, Builder's Emporium, Circuit City, Comp USA, Radio Shack, ...
Are we just listing failures now?