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Google to Use Zagat to Refine Local Search
By Glenn Collins for The New York Times' 'Diner's Journal Blog'
Last year, when Google paid $151 million to buy Zagat,the restaurant-ratings publisher, people wondered how it would integrate customer-generated restaurant guides and online reviews into its universe of search.
Eight months later, Google is announcing that Zagat will become the cornerstone of a new free service, Google Plus Local, intended to enhance Google’s growing, potentially lucrative local information offerings.
Since its debut last year, Google Plus (the company renders it Google+) has moved into Facebook’s turf of social networking, but its impact has been limited. Google Plus Local, which makes its global debut Wednesday, will use social networking in the form of user reviews to refine search. The new service will adopt not only Zagat’s “poor-to-perfect” 0-to-30 rating scale, but also its proprietary burgundy color on some Google Web pages.
