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I know very little of this, but why would they want to continue with multiple map products?


They won't. I was in Google Maps. They bought Zagat -- remember them? They had the best restaurant reviews in the U.S. pre-Internet. How much have you heard of them lately


Zagat was a loss. But it was also basically a creature of a different era when foodies filled out paper surveys and the results were a pretty decent guide for other foodies. Once it was opened up to the plebes, the results got increasingly bad for that audience as everything got more and more algorithmic. (And, yes, it sort of hung on for a while but it deteriorated more and more.)

Not sure what Google ultimately got out of Zagat rather than maybe a bit of kickstart for restaurant ratings.


It was Marissa Mayer who made that deal. I distinctly remember her saying the goal was an editorially written review for every business on the planet.

Tim Zagat invited us all to visit him if we were in MYC, to get a good restaurant recommendation (and reservation? I'm not sure if he said that).


My dad, who was an executive at a large non-tech company, used to get restaurant recommendations by calling the restaurant critic at the city's newspaper. Different times in a much less scalable world.




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