If you’re a Sydney restaurateur, you should probably ask your customers to stuff the ballot box of Zagat. The now Google-owned guide has just opened up to Sydney restaurants and attractions, with Melbourne soon to come. Compared to US cities where Zagat is an established brand, Australia will have a relatively small group of users log in to vote in the initial rounds of the survey and so this will be a relatively simple vote to game.
It also begins to bring into question how sustainable the big, capsule review sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon will be in Australia as Google can throw their absolute search dominance and money behind chasing reviews.