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Google Is Selling Off Zagat (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Seven years after picking up Zagat for $151 million, Google is selling off the perennial restaurant recommendation service. The New York Times is reporting this morning that the technology giant is selling off the company to The Infatuation, a review site founded nine years back by former music execs. The company had been rumored to be courting a buyer since early this year. As Reuters noted at the time, Zagat has increasingly become less of a focus for Google, as the company began growing its database of restaurant recommendations organically. Zagat, meanwhile, has lost much of the shine it had when Google purchased it nearly a decade ago. The Infatuation, which uses an in-house team of reviewers to write up restaurants in major cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London, is picking up the service for an undisclosed amount. The site clearly believes there's value left in the Zagat brand, even as the business of online reviews has changed significantly in the seven years sinceGoogle picked it up.
I remember buying the red Zagat booklets for various cities in order to find good restaurants while traveling. Unfortunately, Google made it almost useless. I never could find anything in their web site. The app is useless, too. I rarely found a dud with the old books, almost anything rated as excellent was. There is really nothing like it now. Yelp's reviews and ratings seem to be totally random and usually Google doesn't have enough places or enough reviews. Rating Chic-fil-a the same as some fancy steak place is not useful. One is clearly a better dining experience, but you can't really tell from the ratings. That's why Zagat rated food, ambiance and service separately. Hopefully the new overlords can make it great again.
I don't know, but it works for me.
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Are we just listing failures now?