Google, Zagat...who is eating whose lunch?

Google has bought food review business Zagat - ZDNet:

Google on Thursday acquired Zagat in an effort to bolster its local products with the restaurant rating service. More notably is that Zagat is a content company.

In a blog post, Google said that Zagat will “be a cornerstone of our local offering.” Zagat is best known for its original reviews and rating service.

There are a few key elements to the Zagat purchase:

- Google will build out its local coverage and have reviews in more than 100 cities.
- Google is showing that it may actually have to own some content instead of merely aggregating it.
- As Robert Scoble noted, Zagat’s reviews are social friendly and play in with Google+.

Earlier this year, Google ran afoul of Yelp. Yelp argued that Google was importing its user reviews on the Google Places page and not providing any link love. Google later removed external links from its Places page. The Federal Trade Commission is also poking around Google’s actions and whether it favors its own sites over others.

That says it all about why Google may have done the deal really, but the reason I'm even writing about this post is a few years back we were asked to do a study of what Zagat could become in a social media setting and who it may be sold to, and for how much, but I never dreamed Google would be the one to buy them as it made no sense (at the time) that Google would be a content owner. (Our client was not Zagat, but wanted to interest Zagat in a potential transaction - and this was not them as far as I know). ZDNet asks the right questions:

- Will Google keep Zagat’s pay wall? Probably not.
- Will Google maintain Zagat’s guide publishing business?
- Is this Zagat purchase the beginning of a series of content moves for Google? Google’s timing is notable given the struggles of both AOL and Yahoo of late. Both AOL and Yahoo are building out content to differentiate themselves from Google. Now the search giant enters the content game via Zagat.

Even so, with opening up the reviews and sticking ads against them, this is not really going to move the Googleneedle. Zagat is not the quite Huffington Post, or even TechCrunch.

So despite the purchase and the above justifications and possble strategic plays, does it make sense that Google is a content owner now? I must say I'm still not clear why Google would want to be a content owner, it's a whole different culture and business model compared to being an aggregator, especially for a search based one. It ws very fashinable in teh Muiltimedited Mid 90's, everyone talked about being "Gatekeepers" to content and extracting "surplus value" - a bkit like medieval castles on large rivers. Ironically it was Google that broke this content/aggregation model by allowing neutral searches on the open web.

The argument clearly is the "Social" changes things, but we didn't see it at teh time we did the study, and don't see it now. Twitter and Facebook point to content outside themselves all the time, both can give me a restaurant review in a few seconds if I ask (or search them), and there are umpteen free startups out there already.

One to watch, but at the moment I am scratching my head.