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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.

by buckhx 9y ago

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

gapo 9y ago
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 ?
- buckhx 9y ago
  Thanks! 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 ago
Hey - congrats on the fun work ahead. Can you share any details about the challenges you're expecting?
- buckhx 9y ago
  We 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 ago
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.
- buckhx 9y ago
  On 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 ago
    That didn't answer the question.
  - rz2k 9y ago
    Do 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 ago
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?
- buckhx 9y ago
  Yeah 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 ago
    I'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 ago
Are 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 ago
  They'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 ago
Question/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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.
    - 9y ago
got2surf 9y ago
Congratulations! 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 ago
  Our 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 ago
    Absolutely, 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 ago
    There 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 ago
Was Zagat being shopped around, or did you go looking for it specifically?
Rish10yh 9y ago
How 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 ago
  Love 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 ago
Will 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 ago
  The 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 ago
How 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 ago
  Google 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 ago
    Does that mean you're going to do a rewrite ? If so, how do these costs compare to the total acquisition costs ?
    - buckhx 9y ago
      It'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 ago
What do you think about Yelp?
onetimemanytime 9y ago
I am sure you could have gotten it for cheaper. But, hey you had the money and secured it.
AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
We 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    It'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 ago
Can you fix the Android app, it crashes on launch every time on Android 8. I've never used it, ever.
- buckhx 9y ago
  Android 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 ago
That'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?

by buckhx 9y ago

gapo 9y ago

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 ?

buckhx 9y ago
Thanks! 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 ago

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

buckhx 9y ago
We 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 ago

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.

buckhx 9y ago
On 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 ago
  That didn't answer the question.
- rz2k 9y ago
  Do 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 ago

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?

buckhx 9y ago
Yeah 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 ago
  I'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 ago

Are 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 ago
They'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 ago

Question/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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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.
  - 9y ago

got2surf 9y ago

Congratulations! 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 ago
Our 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 ago
  Absolutely, 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 ago
  There 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 ago

Was Zagat being shopped around, or did you go looking for it specifically?

Rish10yh 9y ago

How 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 ago
Love 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 ago

Will 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 ago
The 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 ago

How 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 ago
Google 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 ago
  Does that mean you're going to do a rewrite ? If so, how do these costs compare to the total acquisition costs ?
  - buckhx 9y ago
    It'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 ago

What do you think about Yelp?

onetimemanytime 9y ago

I am sure you could have gotten it for cheaper. But, hey you had the money and secured it.

AndrewUnmuted 9y ago

We 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 ago
I 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 ago
  It'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 ago

Can you fix the Android app, it crashes on launch every time on Android 8. I've never used it, ever.

buckhx 9y ago
Android 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 ago

That'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?