Restaurant Reviews | featured news

It is something every restaurateur and hotel owner knows: good reviews boost takings while terrible ones can close you down. And, in an age when everyone can be an online critic, ratings have never been more important. But until now no one could be sure just how important the online star ratings system employed by sites such as Toptable and Tripadvisor could be for a business's fortunes.

Google Inc. announced Thursday that it has acquired Zagat Survey LLC, the restaurant review and ratings service that is a go-to source for foodies everywhere.

The founders of Zagat Survey hope that the rise of apps will help prove its pay model correct... But in the next breath, most of them wonder why Zagat hasn’t won on the Web. The review site Yelp, for example, which made its debut in 2004, draws much more traffic.