Zomato Gives Up on USA

Zomato has pulled their physical presence from the US; all employees have either left the company or been laid off. The $100M plan to overtake Yelp was badly botched; urbanspoon was always a bit clunky, but Zomato was an unmitigated disaster.

Adding insult to injury, I believe that I caught them scraping content from this website. I had blocked a "scraper", an automated program that downloads content from a web site, and when I had trouble with my "spoonbacks" (the way that urbansoon determined that a blog had given them a reference link) I traced the scraper to the same IP block as the Zomato server. An impossible coincidence? I asked my contact rep and he gave me some story about how they had to check to see if the links from my posts were still active.

Really, I said, So why do you need to pull down menus and images?

I believe that they had some sort of strategy to steal content from blogs and use it on zomato.com. They could just say some person uploaded it, and a blogger would have to spend their whole life requesting that things be taken down.

Other correspondence with them gave me a feeling that something dishonest was going on. I decided not to participate anymore. Zomato barely shows up in searches anymore, and once Google decides you're not worthy, you're done.

Original Content Below

Zomato May Be Scraping Your Blog Content

After the cutover, we had problems using the "spoonbacks" which are the little spoon images on the bottom of each of our pages. I thought it was an HTTPS issue, but regular badges were working ok, I discovered that a java client was pulling down the page before serving the image, and the pull was failing. The reason is that my firewall blocks java clients, as they're usually not real people and they're usually doing something nefarious.

Further investigation showed, curiously, that the same IP block was scraping the site with a java client (that is, a spider program written in Java). Search engines, at least legitimate ones, identify themeselves in the user agent; generally people who are stealing stuff don't.

If you're a blogger and you don't want your content stolen, setup your firewall to block address block 72.54.0.0/16. You can check your logs to see if you're getting a lot of traffic from 72.54.x.x. There are no real people at those addresses, and it seems unlikely that you have a lot of readers in Singapore.

Zomato Takes Over Urbanspoon

In 2009, IAC acquired Urbanspoon for an undisclosed amount in hopes of taking on the elusive local restaurant market. So many others had tried; Aol, citydata.com, menupages. Only Yelp has succeeded to some extent, except that Yelp is a social network that is more focused on crowd-sourcing than providing focus on restaurant info.

In the last few years, IAC has gutted the Urbanspoon core team and the project has hit a virtual roadblock in terms of local expansion, at least here in South Florida. There are hardly any reviews, and few of them are real. Closed venues don't show as being closed, new venues don't have listings at all. When you start trimming staff, you've given up on being successful.

In January 2015, India based Zomato purchased Urbanspoon for an undisclosed sum (sources indicate it might be between 60 and 80 Million). Google paid 150 Million for Zagat, which was only New York and DC and Miami. They basically bought the database and the network infrastructure.

The plan was to cut-over in March. The Urbanspoon brand would be no more.

A Flawed Model

In 2010, Urbanspoon started their "Prime" program, which seemed like a parallel to Yelp's Elite program. I was one of the initial Prime Members. Primes were "trusted" members; Primes can add and edit restaurants without requiring a review. Normally, if a regular person adds a venue, it has to go through a review process. Because they're understaffed, it takes days for a new venue to appear, even if a minor change is made. So the idea was that Primes would maintain the local databases without US staffers having to review them.

At the time, the only "benefit" of being a prime was that we had access to a discussion forum, where we could make suggestions and interact with other Primes and developers. It was a way for them to pick our brains. Yelp, of course, has free parties at restaurants for their Elites.

I got into a bit of trouble the first week, when someone asked what it meant to be a Prime member. "We're Slaves", I said "We do their work so they don't have to pay anyone to do it". A bit of the truth, which the Urbanspoon Team didn't particularly appreciate.

The big problem with the forum was that it was "world-wide", and there were only a couple of Primes per region. So you were discussing issues with people in other parts of the country that had much different issues. People in big cities had different problems than people in the outskirts where there were much fewer users. Urbanspoon was very big in Vancouver and Seattle, where they started, and very sparse in South Florida. It became clear that the Forum wasn't meant to be useful; it was meant as a token privilege to get people to give them free information and to help keep their directories up to date.

Delusional Kate

During my couple of months as a Prime, I had a few tussles with Urbanspoon Team member Kate Leroux. She was responsible for political correctness; criticism wasn't tolerated in the Forums. My initial impression of the forum was that we were supposed to discuss what might be better ways of doing things, but we weren't allowed to tell someone that we didn't like their idea. Anyone involved in problem solving knows that you'll never come up with a solution if you treat all ideas equally. The concept didn't sit well with me.

Kate was also responsible with neighborhood mappings within cities. If you look at a listing in urbanspoon, you'll see that each listing has what's called a breadcrumb line at the top.

Big City Tavern is shown as not being in any neighborhood; just Fort Lauderdale. I tried to point out that while "Las Olas" isn't an official neighborhood, it was one of the most important areas in the city. It wasn't on her little map, so she wasn't interested. Other silliness is that they combine Oakland Park and Wilton Manors into some super neighborhood. I emphasized that Wilton Manors had a special connotation, and that Oakland Park wasn't really a town that anyone ever talks about. A specific example was Pomperdale Deli.

It's kind of silly (and wrong) to claim that Pomperdale Deli is in Wilton Manors or Oakland Park. Again, Kate had no interest in listening to someone who actually knew something about Fort Lauderdale, which is one of the reasons that Urbanspoon has never been very useful.

Ultimately, I apparently stepped over the line when I criticized the prized Urbanspoon iPhone App, which is the thing that brought them national fame. The big thing was a shaker function, where you could shake the phone and it would randomly select a restaurant. While gimmicky, I question how useful that was; are you really going to go to a randomly selected restaurant? Also, the GPS on the original iPhone wasn't very good, and would often place you miles from where you actually were. While the GPS tells you if it was able to get an accurate reading or not (for example it will tell you that the reading is accurate to within 20 meters, or 5,000 meters), the app didn't bother to tell you. It just recommended restaurants that were miles away. I pointed that out in the forum.

Kate doesn't like criticism, so they removed my Prime designation. While I was a Prime, all of the Fort Lauderdale listings were up to date and closed places were marked closed. I stopped adding, editing or noting that restaurants were closed.. It became a total mess. Places that opened in November didn't have listings in May; restaurants closed for 6 months were still shown as open; restaurants not open yet were shown as open. It became as useless a resource as those old "dining guide" directories from yesteryear that were always 2 years out of date.

As it turns out, it was a very good thing, because Urbanspoon never developed their Prime program into anything worthwhile. It was just a waste of time, and it didn't work very well.

Zomato takes Over

The big cut over was on June 1, and so far it's been a disaster. There are MANY things broken, but what seems the most troubling is lack of feedback. When Urbanspoon was at it's peak, i'd get 100 visitors per day through direct links from Urbanspoon. Towards the end, that number was more like 50 per day, so you could tell it was dying. Zomato annoyingly serves it's entire site with HTTPS (SSL secured), so you don't get the referrer information when someone clicks on link to get to your site. So there is no way to determine whether or not the relationship with Zomato is worthwhile or not.

Buying a brand and changing it is a big risk, particularly in a world where Google search ranking controls your fate.

Zomato de-emphasizes Bloggers

Zomato is making a number of huge mistakes, some of which I'd be glad to tell them about if they pay me enough. But one big mistake is the way they are handling bloggers. Zomato is the Yelp of India; the problem here is that we have Yelp, and all of the "Social" people; the kids, the people who want to pretend they are important, are on Yelp and they're not moving to Zomato. The bloggers network is the only thing holding it together. Blogger "reviews" are the only semi-credible ones; of course you have the dishonest "Food and Wine" sites, but some of the bloggers are objective. The only regular people who wrote regular reviews on Urbanspoon were just "friends" of the restaurants, someone who wanted to vent a complaint, or perhaps a competitor. The big thing they've done with Blogs is that they do not intermingle the reviews; so in order to "see" a blog review you have to click a link. That substantially diminishes the visibility of blogs. Many people aren't going to even realize that they're available.

They've also changed the rankings, so that only 6 months of blog posts 'count' towards the rankings. The big problem is that a re-review doesn't count, and you can't change the date of a post. So even though I've been to a place 5 times in 3 years, it's dated as of the first visit and it can't be changed when the review is updated. This is completely broken; Nobody wants to read a 5 year old review, however a review dated 2010 might actually have been re-visited yesterday.

Zomato Isn't Social

Zomato is the opposite of Yelp. So far, I hate it. You can't even contact another member. You can follow someone, but that's it. The timelines are confusing. And without feedback, I have no way of know if anyone is even reading what I write.

They plan to "hire" community managers (local experts), similar to what Yelp does, however they only seem to be hiring 1 person in Miami who is wiling to visit 2-3 restaurants per week. This is one person for all of South Florida; no-one in Orlando. It's a full time job, so they're not going to get a high-powered person, because I doubt they're paying much. It's not going to work, and it will cost them a lot to pay 1000s to have little impact.

It will be interesting to see whether or not Zomato can achieve the search rankings that Urbanspoon did. I wondered how Urbanspoon could maintain their high rankings even as their readership declined.

But the biggest issue is that they are not responsive. I was promised in February by their PR people that so-called Bloggers would be informed as to the details of the cutover and what changes were to be made. I've emailed them 5 times in the last week reporting bugs and other problems and I haven't received 1 response. As bad as Urbanspoon did at so many things, I always got responses, particularly when I reported something materially wrong with the product. Zomato appears to either be overmatched, or disinterested. Either of those are likely precursors to disaster. While they have a couple of things that are better than Urbanspoon, they have a LOT of things that are worse. And many of those things are important.