[buckhx]

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

[ghaff]

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]

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]

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.

[ghaff]

Wirecutter is excellent although, as you suggest, a restaurant is more subjective, has more dishes, has more variance in both the meals and service, etc. The Wirecutter is also pretty focused on identifying one item (with a couple alternatives) as the best choice. What I actually find they're the best for is when I just want to pick something and don't want to immerse myself in research. I find you won't go far wrong.

That said, better restaurant reviewers do try to explain what they liked or didn't like about a dish. But most people are not better restaurant reviewers, are often basing their opinion on just one visit, and are often writing short reviews that are in a different category from a New York Times reviewer writing an in-depth review after going to the restaurant three times.

[buckhx]

We love The Wirecutter and is something we look to a lot from The Infatuation. Their content is fairly "evergreen" and useful. They cover utility aspects great, but generally feel like they don't take design/taste/style into account. That might be that subjective vs. objective nature of reviews that you're alluding to and why their reviews are so effective b/c they take a very objective approach.

[forkandwait]

Probably you meant "conscious" not "conscience".

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/conscien...

[joering2]

Thanks for doing this. Could you share some interesting facts behind the scene of deal maiking? Did you approach google or the other way around?

I'm very interested how this works. I know someone at the big telco company I can't tell name here that was approached about years ago by Google in terms of selling of gmail. But the deal eventually fell between cracks as the price Google wanted for just mailboxes was too big.

[kolpa]

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]

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]

Does that mean you're going to do a rewrite ? If so, how do these costs compare to the total acquisition costs ?

[buckhx]

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.

[Rish10yh]

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]

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?"

[aphextron]

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.

[majos]

Really? I find even Yelp reviews low quality in general, so I use older methods (food forums like Chowhound or eGullet, some bloggers I'm familiar with, sometimes even newspaper critics) to find restaurants.

Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher.

Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

[CommieBobDole]

I've been able to get some value out of Yelp reviews by using the the following guidelines:

First and of course, look at the overall number of reviews and score as a rough guideline. You're probably not going to get burned going to a place with 700 reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Might not be as good as its reviews, but it's probably not crap.

Second, ignore any review with the word "groupon" or "scoutmob" in it. For whatever reason these always seem to be nitpicks about service specifically related to the offer. And if I had a dollar for every "Groupon was for item A, I wanted to apply it to item B, they wouldn't, one star" I've seen, I'd be a wealthy man.

Third, ignore most of the five star and one star reviews. Mostly undeserved gushing, and angry ranting, respectively.

Fourth, generally avoid anything from a user that has "Yelp Elite" next to their names. While some of these are good reviews from informed food enthusiasts, a lot of them are just long-winded twee crap from folks who like the idea of being "elite" at something.

Finally (and most importantly), pay special attention to the two and three star reviews. This is the meat of Yelp. They will say moderately bad things about the restaurant, usually with reasons to back it up. Often you'll start to see a theme. Whatever issues the restaurant has, this is where you'll find them. This is where you'll find out the popular place for some cuisine is actually kind of mediocre and everyone familiar with that cuisine goes somewhere else that's less popular but has better food, or whatever.

Then you ask yourself, "Is this something I care about?" If I want the best Ćevapi in town, do I really care about the dozen two and three star reviews that complain that the waiters only speak Croatian? Or will I show up with my handy Croatian phrasebook?

Yelp is a pit of crap, but there's gold in that crap. Usually.

[ghaff]

>pay special attention to the two and three star reviews.

I find that's often the case on Amazon as well. On your typical book review, say, there are a lot of 4s or 5s that are gushing praise because it's someone's favored author or genre or whatever. 1s tend to be "It sucked. Read 10 pages and threw it out."

2s and 3s as you say are more likely to be along the lines of "Really tried to like it because it had good ideas and I've liked author X in the past but this book was just too disjoined and confusing to recommend it."

[z0r]

I've found 1 star reviews to be hugely useful on Amazon. Often have seen detailed contrarian 1 star reviews for books that have nearly a 5 star average and found very interesting viewpoints. This works especially well when you're suspicious of the product being a scam - less the case for books, but very useful for other consumer products. The 1 star reviews are where people who received a cheap knock off or something that broke or otherwise failed quickly complain. I like to read the 2 and 3 star reviews as well but there's a similar amount of filtering necessary in my experience.

[L_Rahman]

'Sometimes even newspaper critics' - oh man this is harsh. I don't like the biases that newspaper critics tend to have but Pete Wells and Ruth Reichl at the Times, Sietsema (previously at the Village Voice, now at Eater) all do excellent reporting.

But I agree that it all pales in comparison to amateur enthusiast communities and specialist blogs.

[ghaff]

I put Yelp in the category of often (maybe even usually) better than sticking a finger on the map. Or just finding some minimally acceptable place. But, I agree that it's not great and, for me at least, a lot of reviewers seem to have very different priorities than I do and there often do seem to be a lot of weird complaints.

[arkades]

I find Yelp a very reliable source of tourist traps.

If you’re not in an area where that’s a risk, it’s not a good way to find -good- food, but it’s a good way to find the best local mainstream food. If the local mainstream best is mediocre... yeah, it’ll be 5 stars on yelp.

[ghaff]

I don't really disagree with that. It's also a reasonably good way (most of the time) to avoid really bad choices. I certainly don't love Yelp but it's often better than alternatives when traveling. It's not like I find asking for recommendations at a hotel necessarily yields great results either.

[drb91]

You can’t go by the calculated review number; you should read the reviews (which it seems like you already do on other sites.) I would focus on the individual reviews and ignore the aggregate entirely.

It would also be nice if you could rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately. But you can’t, so it’s meaningless.

[ghaff]

>rate for, like, food, service, and atmosphere separately

Which is what Zagat was like initially.

[timr]

"Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up."

No, they don't. This is a rumor that is often repeated, but is never backed with evidence that goes beyond hearsay.

Also, I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.

[majos]

The evidence against Yelp seems to amount to a (from what I can tell sizeable) population of small business owners who claim that Yelp 1. is extremely aggressive about selling its advertising services (perhaps annoying, but not criminal) and 2. responds to failure to buy these services by filtering or deleting positive reviews.

Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least.

Yelp has turned these attacks away in court, but the (apparent) last ruling on this seemed to come down to an inability on the plaintiffs' side to prove Yelp actually changes review visibility based on advertising [1].

It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation. But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms. It's not like I'm using Reddit posts to support anti-vax arguments, small business owners can definitely reason about how Yelp operates from their interactions with it.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/11/people-keep-suing-yelp-over-it...

[timr]

"Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least."

No, the "evidence" exists entirely in hearsay form. All you ever see are stories about parents, friends of friends, distant cousins, and so on. There's almost never so much as a link to the business page. Why? Because it's trivial to debunk these claims when you can see the reviews.

"It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation."

Not just silly, but absurd. It's internet conspiracy theory, and people are just thoughtlessly repeating it as fact.

"But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms."

If Yelp revealed how reviews are filtered, the filters would be rendered useless overnight. It would be the equivalent of Google publicly documenting their search algorithm. And while I think Yelp does many things badly when it comes to this stuff, they're 100% clear about how reviews and ads interact: they don't.

[paulgb]

> I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.

I wouldn't expect there to be a literal code switch that deletes bad reviews if someone pays for ads. But I can imagine a system developing naturally (even by accident!) where it's easier to get a human at Yelp to intervene when non-customers or bots left bad reviews.

Did Yelp have systems in place (e.g. a "Chinese wall") to prevent someone's status as a customer from impacting their ability to resolve a complaint about abusive negative reviews?

[timr]

Yes.

[aphextron]

>Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.

[azinman2]

Disagree. Take El Faro on 1st [1], it’s actually pretty good (their taco dorado al pastor is really good), yet it has a 2.5 rating. It’s also been in business for years, so clearly something else is keeping them alive than their yelp rating. And if you look at individual reviews, there are a bunch of 4 and 5 stars, yet they disappear when scrolling a search list.

I’ve also found many 4+ star restaurants entirely overrated and quite mediocre.

It’s all about the category and how it fits into the local milieux, which might place emphasis on things you don’t care about or expect (the ambiance sucks at el faro, for example, but it’s a lunchtime tacqueria I could care less). People take away stars from it because it’s cash only. Sorry, but what exactly is it that we’re rating here?

That lack of common consensus and the wide disparity between expectations means yelp aggregates aren’t always so useful. I wish they did a better job of showing me the reviews and stars of the things that matter to me, not to the shapeless aggregate. Or at least give me a sense of the distribution to know if there’s more/less contention than normal.

[1] https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-faro-san-francisco-3

[nix0n]

Yelp's reviews are probably real, but Yelp also throws out a lot of real reviews, and they do this in a way that will skew the star rating up or down depending on whether the business purchases Yelp ads.

Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.

[ISL]

Google Maps seems to have reliable open/closed times (with histograms).

[buckhx]

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.

[rz2k]

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... [2] http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ [3] https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028

[eitally]

Thank you for so clearly articulating an extremely common problem.

[rz2k]

It seems like an unusual problem. Zagat reviewers[1] were volunteers, but they remained anonymous so there was little opportunity to promote themselves. If I remember people seemed motivated by getting a guide sent to them and feeling like they were part of an in group. I don't know what would work now to avoid fake reviews and reviews promoting the reviewers.

It would be interesting to see what happened if it were limited to a subset of people who used OpenTable for minimum number of reservations per year or some other metric, and then was based on a Keynesian Beauty Contest[1], where a consensus is divined by reviewers earning prizes for correctly guessing which restaurants other reviewers like.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=CfS7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=P...

[lod723]

That didn't answer the question.

[magnetic]

What is it about Yelp that makes you trust them?

[got2surf]

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]

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]

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 [e-mail]

[johnbenwoo]

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 [e-mail]

[jonknee]

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

[puzzle]

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]

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.

[sunsetMurk]

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

[buckhx]

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.

[tmaly]

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]

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.

[foobaw]

What do you think about Yelp?

[gapo]

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]

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.

[prepend]

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]

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]

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?

[ma2rten]

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?

[CoolGuySteve]

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

[buckhx]

Android app will get a face lift, but it'll be a few months out as we need to transition the infrastructure over first.

[onetimemanytime]

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

[AndrewUnmuted]

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.

[Eric_WVGG]

"things that New York used to excel at - taxis"

wait what

[ericd]

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"?

[kelukelugames]

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.