Doesn't strike me as an apples-apples comparison. Some data is not free. The web is decentralized and anyone can request a URL and maybe get a response. Not all data sources are like this. ITA doesn't own the airline data -- it receives feeds of it from the airlines. That data costs a lot of money. I would also imagine that Zagat reviews cost money to create and aggregate.
Let's think about it. Instead of buying Zagat, Google could propose a distributed protocol (or microformat/schema for HTML) to publish a review and then they could just wait for it to catch on and then crawl that. But that is not going to help users today. Plus they've already scraped reviews from other sites and that just caused those sites (Yelp) to become very upset that their reviews are being shown on Google place pages (despite the fact they could always robot-out Places specifically).
Encouraging high-quality content on the web is not out of vogue at Google -- this would be silly because the #1 reason people still use Google is to find content on the web. However, it's not surprising to me that given the option to improve Google local quality today they would make an acquisition like this. If you were in Marrisa Mayer's position, what decision would you make?
The problem is Google is now too big and too much of a lawsuit target to get away with aggregating other people's data any more. Web Search is the ultimate aggregation of other people's content, and it's a good thing it's already invented because it would never get off the ground today. Crawling other people's content? Lawsuit. Linking? Lawsuit. Cache? Lawsuit. Allowing searches on trademarked terms? Lawsuit. Snippets in the result page? So many lawsuits! Using user click/query data for Suggest and/or ranking? Outcry in the EU. FTC launches investigations; DOJ sues. Congress steps in; Google forced to back down.
Let's think about it. Instead of buying Zagat, Google could propose a distributed protocol (or microformat/schema for HTML) to publish a review and then they could just wait for it to catch on and then crawl that. But that is not going to help users today. Plus they've already scraped reviews from other sites and that just caused those sites (Yelp) to become very upset that their reviews are being shown on Google place pages (despite the fact they could always robot-out Places specifically).
Encouraging high-quality content on the web is not out of vogue at Google -- this would be silly because the #1 reason people still use Google is to find content on the web. However, it's not surprising to me that given the option to improve Google local quality today they would make an acquisition like this. If you were in Marrisa Mayer's position, what decision would you make?