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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Unlike this comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May be a related story: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-zagat-story-2013-6" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/google-zagat-story-2013-6</a>