14 DAY TRIAL // Google has acquired restaurant review and guide Zagat, a well-known brand, to bolster its increasingly large local services and sites. With Zagat, Google gets access to a rather large number of quality, trusted reviews as well as the Zagat brand.
Zagat, which has a website, but also publishes a printed guide for restaurants and other places in many cities, will continue to work as is, for now.
Some of the content on the Zagat website is behind a paywall, but there is free content as well.
Google hasn't really said anything, but it plans to integrate the reviews into its existing Places service.
"With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry," Marissa Mayer, VP of Local, Maps and Location Services at Google, wrote.
"Founded by Tim and Nina Zagat more than 32 years ago, Zagat has established a trusted and well-loved brand the world over, operating in 13 categories and more than 100 cities," she said.
Google already has its own user reviews, via Hotpot which has now been merged into Places, but the new content should really bolster its offering and help it better compete with other sites offering local reviews, Yelp in particular.
Google tried to buy Yelp a few years back for $500 million, but failed. Since then, the relationship between the two companies has been tense. Recently, Google removed all third-party reviews from its Places site, including Telp reviews.
"Their surveys may be one of the earliest forms of UGC (user-generated content)—gathering restaurant recommendations from friends, computing and distributing ratings before the Internet as we know it today even existed," Mayer added.
Along with the burgeoning Offers, the existing Places, the Dealmap site it acquired last month and, of course, the granddaddy of them all Google Maps, the company is in a pretty good position.