Google’s announcement to acquire Zagat shows a major shift in the local/review space. Most interesting is that Zagat is a content company Google usually only curates information rather than owning it outright.
Google has toyed with local ratings, search and reviews for quite some time, but it appears the the company is now very serious after an acquisition of ratings-mogul Zagat. It’s not a terribly surprising move, when you look at Google’s history with local, ratings and the like, but it’s probably not the one that we thought the company would make. In fact, this might have very little to do with local, from a macro scale.
More details from TheNextWeb.