Zagat

The Zagat Survey /zəˈɡæt/ or zə-GAT was established by Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979 as a way to collect and correlate the ratings of restaurants by diners; for their first guide, covering New York City, the Zagats surveyed their friends. At its height, ca. 2005, the Zagat Survey included 70 cities, with reviews based on the input of 250,000 individuals with the guides reporting on and rating restaurants, hotels, nightlife, shopping, zoos, music, movies, theaters, golf courses, and airlines. The guides are sold in book form, and were formerly only available as a paid subscription on the Zagat website. As part of its $125 million acquisition by Google in September 2011, Zagat's offering of reviews and ratings became a part of Google's Geo and Commerce group, eventually to be tightly integrated into Google's services. Google relaunched Zagat's website on July 29, 2013 with an improved interface, but cut down the site from 30 cities to 9. They released a searchable database of reviews from the other 21 cities in the following days while they worked on expanding to include more cities in the new site. In December 2012, Google announced that it would lay off most former full-time Zagat employees that had been extended as contractors at the time of the acquisition, leading to prophetic business reports describing the future of Zagat book production as bleak, and subsequent business news reports recording the contraction of their print businesses. Regardless, Google's acquisition and integration of Zagat provided it a strong brand in local restaurant recommendations and ample content for location-based searches.