Just weeks after nabbing Motorola Mobility (and dumping some of its older products), Google is adding to its list of acquisitions with the purchase of Zagat.
"Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world," Marissa Mayer, vice president of local, maps, and location services at Google, wrote in a blog post.
Mayer had few other details about the purchase, except to say that the search giant will collaborate with Zagat to "bring the power of Google search and Google Maps to their products and users, and to bring their innovation, trust and wealth of experience to our users."
Google will also "gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry," she continued.
Mayer championed the Zagat surveys as "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. "Their iconic pocket-sized guides with paragraphs summarizing and 'snippeting' sentiment were 'mobile' before 'mobile' involved electronics," Mayer wrote.
Perhaps Zagat can help boost Google's Places pages. Earlier this week, Places made headlines for allowing certain businesses to be designated as "permanently closed" even when they were open. Google promised a fix in the coming days.
In July, Google updated Places to make it easier to access information, upload pictures, and see reviews. Not everyone was pleased with Places, however, particularly rival review sites. As a result, Google removed "review snippets from other web sources" like Yelp from Places. Presumably, Zagat ratings could now have priority.
"Rating and review counts reflect only those that've been written by fellow Google users, and as part of our continued commitment to helping you find what you want on the web, we're continuing to provide links to other review sites so you can get a comprehensive view of locations across the globe," Google said at the time.
The Zagat announcement also comes one day after Google expanded its deals offering to five more cities: Austin, Boston, D.C., Denver and Seattle.