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Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site
- buckhx 9y agoCTO 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
- gapo 9y agoHello ! 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 ?
- buckhx 9y agoThanks! Zagat really was the OG user generated content platform. They distributed surveys out and used the responses to form their short iconic reviews. We want to bring Zagat back to it's roots, but powered with modern technology to make that happen. Decoupling Google is going to be a big challenge for sure. Luckily, we have good experience around most of the technologies involved. The biggest challenge will probably be around finding proxy data/tech for things that only exist internal to Google. They obviously have an incredibly rich dataset to build off of and we'll need to find a way to deal with not having that.
- sunsetMurk 9y agoHey - congrats on the fun work ahead. Can you share any details about the challenges you're expecting?
- buckhx 9y agoWe have an aggressive timeline to extract Zagat from Google. We're still going to leverage a number of their technologies (GCP, Go, Protobufs, etc..), but we basically need to re-implement their platform on infrastructure we own. Going to take notes along the way and be able to s hare how the process went when the transition is over.
- aphextron 9y agoWhat precisely are you guys doing to ensure review authenticity? This is the number one reason I ignore all reviews all the internet but Yelp.
- buckhx 9y agoOn The Infatuation we have staff writers visit a restaurant multiple times and make sure we have our opinion has been as informed as possible. Our biggest problem is scaling that process and we want to use Zagat to help with that via user generated content. We want to take learnings from other UGC platforms to inform the direction we take with Zagat and a big piece of that is authenticity.
- lod723 9y agoThat didn't answer the question.
- rz2k 9y agoDo you have a specific market of consumers you want to target? A while ago there was large thread on Reddit asking anyone who had eaten at the Olive Garden in Times Square, why[1] they had chosen to eat there. There were people who thought it was one of the funniest questions that they'd ever read on /r/askreddit, and people who didn't understand why it was an interesting or funny question. Byant Park Grill is a nearby restaurant that is not a tiny hole in the wall, and the dishes are not that exotic. For context, here are two dishes that are on today's menu at the different restaurants: - Bryant Park Grill[2] $28.50 - Grilled Soy Honey Glazed Atlantic Salmon "stir fried broccoli, snow peas, carrots, roasted potatoes, soy ginger butter sauce" - Olive Garden Times Square $27.79 - Salmon Piccata[3] "Grilled salmon topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Served with parmesan-crusted zucchini" The prices are not extremely different, the wait times are similar if you show up at the door, and it would be naïve to think that Olive Garden hasn't put a lot of thought and research into exactly how they make their food. I wouldn't be surprised if the diners at Bryant Park Grill are even disappointed in their meals more often than the diners at Olive Garden, but I suppose they also think something is above average more often at Bryant Park Grill and occasionally excellent. The same people at Bryant Park Grill might go to Olive Garden, but it is to bring a group of their summer interns for a celebration or maybe when dining out with elderly family members. When they travel with their own families, they avoid chain restaurants and look for either a generic diner, or a restaurant that has been recommended verbally by a local or someone working at the desk at a hotel. How do people who consider something like the Bryant Park Grill a large restaurant with a safe, but not exceptional menu quickly find the equivalent somewhere like Palo Alto? I feel like asking a dozen people between 30 and 60 would find them all suggesting the same two or three restaurants, but review sites never seem to be able to do this. Instead, sites like Yelp seem to have a lot of reviewers who are talking about themselves as tastemakers, who pride themselves on discovering secret gems, and being offended by something weird at places that have favorable word-of-mouth reputations. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors_who_have_eaten_at_the_times_square/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors... [2] http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ [3] https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028 https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028
- prepend 9y agoThis 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?
- buckhx 9y agoYeah we're getting all of the Zagat specific content, but there is loads of Google data that we won't have access to moving forward. We'll continue to have a symbiotic relationship with Google from a data/content perspective, but being an external entity will limit us in some capacities.
- chatmasta 9y agoI'm curious, did you have to sign any sort of anti-trust paperwork acknowledging that Google will not grant you preferred spots in listings? Is Google able to give your content preferential treatment in its index?
- puzzle 9y agoAre Tim and Nina Zagat part of the deal? They were still at Google when I left, but they are approaching their 80s now.
- buckhx 9y agoThey're out living their best life right now. We'll have a relationship with them, but right now they don't have formal roles with us. We had a good chat with them a couple weeks ago about the technology side of things and they definitely have a great perspective on things.
- ghaff 9y agoQuestion/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 and the type of user participation that you'll encourage?
- buckhx 9y agoI 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 person is and don't know why they should trust them. Want to combat that out of the gate. Tim & Nina actually took the same approach originally by sending surveys out to people they thought would have valuable opinions and rewarding them with a printed guide.
- arkades 9y agoI don’t know if this is applicable to a restaurant review guide, but: I find The Wirecutter / Sweethome to be really great for consumer reviews. Specifically, because they’re transparent about the qualifications of the reviewer, and transparent about the criteria on which their subjects will be evaluated, including “we interviewed X, Y, Z and they identified a, b, c as the most important metrics because of R.” So I know why I should trust the author, their metric choices, and the results - which makes it easy for me to decide whether their judgment reflects my own priorities. That seems like a lot more effort, in a distinct vein, than the usual restaurant review. Food is, of course, more subjective but the usual review seems like a highly evolved version of “I liked this.” I don’t care if a reviewer “likes this,” I want to know if they liked it —and- an indicator of how or why to generalize those results to my own tastes.
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- got2surf 9y agoCongratulations! This looks like a great purchase, especially for the brand value of Zagat. Do you see The Infatuation continuing to focus on reviews, or adding in more analytics a la Medallia or Revinate? We do customer feedback analysis and have a few clients in the restaurant space - it's always interesting to hear about what value-adds review sites can have.
- buckhx 9y agoOur take right now is that The Infatuation will focus on subjective takes with our reviews and guides and Zagat will be more data driven from the community. That being said, we're going to have to be pragmatic through this. Would love to hear some of the feedback you've heard about review sites in general.
- got2surf 9y agoAbsolutely, that makes sense. Sure, would love to talk - we've worked with a few large restaurant/hospitality brands so far. Mainly the feedback has been around patterns of reviews, difference in tone, and whether review sites require a comment in addition to a rating or not. Happy to talk offline at neel@datanautix.com
- johnbenwoo 9y agoThere are a lot of reasons that Yelp is frustrating, but one thing it does semi-well is include recommendations on (and, separately, pictures of) which dishes to try first. Especially at ethnic holes-in-the-wall, it can be a barrier to visiting the restaurants at all. Happy to chat offline - feel free to reach out at Ben@redskyinsights.com
- jonknee 9y agoWas Zagat being shopped around, or did you go looking for it specifically?
- Rish10yh 9y agoHow does my social network play into recommendations. I often find myself asking friends with similar tastes for suggestions as random reviews online are not trustworthy, I don't think the crowd average informs me much plus food bloggers who review restuarants seem to be too out there for me. How does one personalize these reccos?
- buckhx 9y agoLove this and we've been thinking about it a lot. I'd say that most UGC platform ratings fall into the base rate fallacy and there is a lot more information available that could be leveraged for recommendations. A very indicative question of the direction we're looking to go is "Will I like this place given that people I trust recommend it?"
- tmaly 9y agoWill you continue to generate reviews in house, or do you have plans to engage a broader audience who will provide content? I have always felt the internet 1% rule to be extremely challenging in this respect. I took a stab with my food side project, but getting input has been quite a challenge.
- buckhx 9y agoThe Infatuation will continue to write reviews and guides in house. We're looking to build a community to power the content on Zagat and curate content while we build that out. Building a community will definitely be a challenge, but hopefully we have a head start from the Zagat brand being so iconic in the space.
- kolpa 9y agoHow does that sort of migration work, at a high level? Will Google run Zagat for you until you can operate it without depending on Google-internal components? Or do you have early-access to the system so you can build your port before the sale completes?
- buckhx 9y agoGoogle will run Zagat in prod for an agreed amount of time while we develop a separate platform that implements the same endpoints on our infrastructure. Once we're done with that, we'll switch client applications over to read from the new platform. It's going to be a great challenge to tackle and I'd love to be able to share how it all went once the transition is complete.
- stingraycharles 9y agoDoes that mean you're going to do a rewrite ? If so, how do these costs compare to the total acquisition costs ?
- buckhx 9y agoIt's not a full-blown rewrite, but it's not just spin up new infrastructure and run it over here either. We're receiving Zagat specific code, but there are significant gaps from missing Google dependencies and data that need to be filled. The transition costs aren't negligible by any means, but are worth the opportunity.
- foobaw 9y agoWhat do you think about Yelp?
- onetimemanytime 9y agoI am sure you could have gotten it for cheaper. But, hey you had the money and secured it.
- AndrewUnmuted 9y agoWe New Yorkers have relied upon the wisdom of Zagat's for many decades. Please, I beg you, be kind to this brand and don't change the things that enable the content to be so high quality and reliable. A lot of things that New York used to excel at - taxis, delivery, etc. - are now being offered to the rest of the world at terribly high prices and remarkably sub-par service. It has come to impact the NY services that started it all. Please, don't be the Uber to Zagat's yellow cab.
- kelukelugames 9y agoI first heard of the infatuation when they made the news a few years ago for being tasteless. It's the same people running the company, but it's possible they've changed.
- Eric_WVGG 9y ago"things that New York used to excel at - taxis" wait what
- ericd 9y agoIt's true, NYC cabs are great relative to cabs in most other cities. I still find them generally more convenient than Uber when I visit. Or are you talking about "used to excel"?
- CoolGuySteve 9y agoCan you fix the Android app, it crashes on launch every time on Android 8. I've never used it, ever.
- buckhx 9y agoAndroid app will get a face lift, but it'll be a few months out as we need to transition the infrastructure over first.
- ma2rten 9y agoThat's interesting. How tied is it to Google's tech? Do you get access to Google's servers? Do you get engineering support from Google?
- misterbowfinger 9y agoWoah 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 9y agoHopeful 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.
- prepend 9y agoThis 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.
- malchow 9y agoIs data stripping the new asset stripping?
- prepend 9y agoIt would explain a lot.
- ucaetano 9y agoNot really, data is replicable, assets aren't. So you can buy a company, strip all of its data, and resell for a similar value than you bought it for. You can't do that with asset stripping. But, on the other hand, if the data striping happens again and again, the company becomes worthless, even if it still has all of the assets and data. Ah, the wonders of the information economy...
- djtriptych 9y agoPretty 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 9y agoThat'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.
- whitepoplar 9y agoQuestion: 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 9y agoOur 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.
- overcast 9y agoAwesome news, and congrats to the Infatuation team. You guys have been killing it! Question, do you work with local marketers that share the same ideals? I run the largest food and cocktail promotion gig in Rochester, NY, that focuses on only the best. All photography, content, and relationships are handled solely by me. I won't post anything I don't love, so there is no negativity, and my followers expect that level of integrity. The scene has been growing hand over fist here, and it would be killer to get more coverage outside of the area. https://instagram.com/rocfoodies https://instagram.com/rocfoodies https://rocfoodies.com https://rocfoodies.com
- alexbeloi 9y agoIs 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 9y agoOur 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.
- ohf 9y agoSo - 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 9y agoDon'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 9y agoTruth 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 9y agoReally 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.
- eeereerews 9y agoWhat a title.
- jdlyga 9y agoI'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.
- telltruth 9y agoWhat'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 9y agoGoogle 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).
- tentakull 9y agoI 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.
- pmarreck 9y agoZagat... Wow. There's a name that was once synonymous with the PalmPilot.