
Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site - scdoshi
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/business/dealbook/zagat-google-infatuation.html
======
buckhx
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](https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers)

~~~
aphextron
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.

~~~
majos
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 the "hobbyists"
(forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge
and care is much higher.

Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from
businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

~~~
timr
_" 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.

~~~
majos
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 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.

Yelp has turned these attacks away in court, but the (apparent) last ruling on
this seemed to come down to an inability on the plaintiffs' side to prove Yelp
actually changes review visibility based on advertising [1].

It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits
and a dropped FTC investigation. 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. It's not like I'm using Reddit posts to support anti-vax
arguments, small business owners can definitely reason about how Yelp operates
from their interactions with it.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2015/11/people-keep-suing-yelp-over-
it...](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/people-keep-suing-yelp-over-its-reviews-
and-keep-losing/)

~~~
timr
_" 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.

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prepend
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.

~~~
chatmasta
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.

~~~
sf_rob
Publishing something does not make it public domain. I am not a lawyer, but
saying they can do anything with what they scrape seems questionable.

~~~
chatmasta
I mean in practice they can get away with it. As of now, there are no audit
trails required for training of machine learning algorithms.

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ohf
So - Zagat and the Infatuation have a reputation for quality over quantity,
and function more as "restaurant guides" than "review services", such as Yelp
(fwiw, Yelp sucks).

I'd wager that Google doesn't have a platform like this in its corporate
strategy. What other high (-er) quality, curated content does Google provide?
I suppose a case could be made for its SEO algorithms (if you call that
curating), but I feel that has more applications for its existing review
service than something like Zagat.

~~~
buckhx
Don't have too much context on high (er) quality content in the rest of
Google's portfolio, but we definitely were drawn to Zagat and saw it as a
great counterpart to The Infatuation for exactly this reason. Quality over
quantity will remain our principle strategy to tackling this space, but we
will be exploring new avenues to scale this out more broadly with Zagat moving
forward.

~~~
lsen001
Truth be told, I haven't heard of The Infatuation until today. However, I have
heard of Zagat and imbue a level of trust with that brand name. I may not
represent your main target audience, but I've done many searches for
restaurant recommendations, mostly on Yelp (with the appropriate grain of
salt). Now, I'm curious - has the idea of fully assuming the Zagat name been
kicked around? It's been a while since the Google acquisition, however, it's
been around so long that there's still good name recognition.

~~~
buckhx
Really looking to make the brands symbiotic. A model we're drawing from is
Rotten Tomatoes where The Infatuation is the critic score and Zagat is the
community score.

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misterbowfinger
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.

~~~
ghaff
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.

------
jdlyga
I'm glad about this. When Google bought Zagat, they basically sat on it for a
few years, batted it around a little, and let it go. It's lost a lot of its
positive reputation. I'm glad to have it be in better hands.

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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.

------
whitepoplar
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.

~~~
buckhx
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 worked for us to grow well into
profitability.

~~~
alexbeloi
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.

~~~
buckhx
Our deals with partners are a combination of integrated content (API), events
and branded content.

We respond to RFPs from brands with a proposal of how we would help them reach
their goals and then execute it. Examples of brands we've worked with are
Amex, Delta, Caviar, etc.

We never accept money from restaurants or groups representing their interests,
something we really try to hammer home in our review ride-alongs on Instagram.

~~~
shostack
So would this be more of the original Buzzfeed model then where brands would
get sponsored posts written for them, and then Buzzfeed would handle the
marketing of said post?

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pmarreck
Zagat... Wow. There's a name that was once synonymous with the PalmPilot.

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djtriptych
Pretty cool. I always suspected Google really bought Zagat in the first place
because it was easier than evicting them from 111 8th, Google's NYC HQ. Zagat
was a tenant when Google bought that building a few years back.

Spotify was too. Wonder if there were ever talks of a buyout.

~~~
puzzle
That's not true, Zagat was in Columbus Circle. They moved months after the
acquisition.

Spotify was subleasing space from someone else in the building, something that
the owners, Google themselves, did not know and most likely did not
appreciate.

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eeereerews
What a title.

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telltruth
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 up on their long term vision that they
rather just wanted out. Google used to be a very cool company. It stopped
being cool on the day Boston Dynamics left the building.

~~~
polishTar
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).

