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Google Acquiring Frommer's In Big Travel Data Play
Nerval's Lobster writes with the widely-reported news that Google plans to acquire from publisher John Wiley & Sons the Frommer's travel guides,
along with Wiley's other travel-related publishing assets. "This marks Google's second purchase of a popular guide in less than a year. In September 2011, the search engine giant acquired Zagat, with the intention of mining the company's enormous trove of data on restaurants and local points of interest. Zagat scores and summaries now appear in the Google+ Local tab (present on the left rail of the Google+ profile page). Google's acquisition streak reveals a particular conundrum facing tech companies that offer travel and location services: you can assign thousands of the world's best software engineers the task of creating a simple, intuitive interface for ferreting out the best airline fares or restaurants—but sooner or later, you'll need to fill that system with reliable content."
Purchasing services doesn't mean you're being anti-competitive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
This makes open-source content projects such as Wikitravel (currently under consideration to be adopted by the Wikimedia Foundation) all the more important.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You mean this? Colbert's take on AT&T
Come on, this has got to be getting into anti-trust issues.
Sorry, but the anti trust laws went the way of the Constitution. Both are completely ignored now. That's why we have companies that are too big to fail. Anti trust laws should have limited banks like Chase buying up all the competition. That's why we no longer have nice honest small town banks anymore.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Google's managed to attract only pretty low-quality reviews via crowdsourcing so far. Check out some random places near you: they're much worse than even Yelp or TripAdvisor on the whole. So either they can try to figure out how to fix that, or they can leave it as a cesspool, or they can give up on the crowdsourcing and buy some editorial reviews. Looks like they took the latter strategy.
It seems reasonably smart to me. In maps/location type stuff Google's advantage is their interfaces and technology, not their ability to compete with someone like Yelp in community-building. So if they can populate their technology with a big batch of purchased content, that's probably a win.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
At least in my town there are some awful restaurants that have all the negative reviews "Filtered" and receive good ratings, above legitimately good restaurants. I've found the reviews on tripadvisor.com to be more trustworthy.