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.<p>If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: <a href="https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers" rel="nofollow">https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers</a>
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?<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Spotify was too. Wonder if there were ever talks of a buyout.
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.