

How Google Has Completely Botched Zagat - wikiburner
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-31/how-google-has-completely-botched-zagat

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billwilliams
This is ridiculous. Zagat was not bought for its terrible app. It was bought
so google would have an excellent amount of curated data on locations and
restaurants.

Google pages and google maps had zagat ratings 1 month after Zagat was bought.
All that data was free 1 Month after google bought zagat. Just open up google
maps, boom zagat ratings.

The zagat guide was always hard to read through. The zagat app was always
crap. All zagat had was their data, and thats what google has successfully
leveraged. This article is a rant that shouldn't have been given a forum.

Unlike this comment.

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jmharvey
The old Zagat did the scammy thing where they made it easy to pay for a
subscription but forced you to spend 90 minutes on the phone to cancel it.
Google may have turned it into a dime-a-dozen app that's not as useful as the
old version, but at least they're not trying to make a fast buck off of people
who don't want to be their customers.

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logn
I don't get the article's point. They had me on agreeing there are too many
geo-social food apps. Then they lost me when they slammed Zagat for not being
one.

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some_guy_there
I installed Zagat app once after they were acquired by Google, and they kept
on sending me spam after spam, with opt-out. I won't even try the new app
anymore.

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lotso
The old Zagat app was probably the best food app I've used on my iPhone. The
new one doesn't even let me search beyond the ~6 cities listed in it.
Terrible.

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sytelus
May be a related story: [http://www.businessinsider.com/google-zagat-
story-2013-6](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-zagat-story-2013-6)

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ashbrahma
Looks like all their international locations are gone.

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gojomo
Maybe they can sell it to Yahoo.

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slykat
Actually might make sense; Marissa was behind the purchase of Zagat at Google.

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wikiburner
Yeah, I was just about to say this. Apparently she was the one who championed
it's purchase, and now that she's gone, Zagat is apparently the redheaded
stepchild of the Google family.

