Zagat's 30-Point Scale Is No More

Thirty-five years after it was founded in New York, the Zagat restaurant guide is ditching its 30-point rating scale to better compete with companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor, Bloomberg reports. A survey of Zagat customers found they wanted something simpler, so Google, which bought the company in 2011, launched a revamped Zagat app Tuesday. Instead of trying to split the different between a "26" dining experience and a "27" dining experience, users will now rate restaurants on a five-point scale from "poor" to "perfection." According to Zagat, the new app will recommend restaurants to users based on their location and the time of day.

Engadget calls the Zagat update "simply a nice experience" and "good enough to make it your primary solution for discovering new places to eat." By keeping what always made it good—editorial reviews of restaurants created from the reviews of users—and adding the best aspects of Foursquare and Yelp, the new Zagat app is an improvement on those competitors, Engadget reports. (More Zagat stories.)