Yelp Official Blog

Collaborative filtering is the obvious way to make a scalable restaurant ratings service. Google tried to do it and apparently failed; then Yelp tried to do it [http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/06/whats-nearby.html]. Not being a Yelp user myself, I don't know if they are still doing this. Anybody have insight into whether Yelp is still personalizing recommendations or why personalization hasn't worked in restaurants (in contrast to e.g., Netflix)?

Yelp has a system. It doesn't seem to be perfect; I've seen what looks like both false-negative and false-positive classification of fake reviews. But it seems to work decently well. One thing I do like about their system is that you can click a link to read the reviews they consider "not recommended." Here's what they say about it publicly: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/11/yelp-recommended-reviews.html

You can imagine this as a scrape of our website for the specific businesses listed (and their associated recommended reviews and tips, and the associated users for that content) on the date the dataset was generated (which you can assume is the last timestamp). For more information about recommended reviews please check out: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/11/yelp-recommended-reviews.html Let me know if you have any other questions!

this was just one of their "partners" but as long as you were logged in with Facebook their "partner" would automatically have access to your information. If you notice its opt-out. http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/04/here-at-yelp-were-always-excited-… Theres the facebook beacon debacle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

Yelp's response: http://officialblog.yelp.com

Yelp INTERN OR FULLTIME in SAN FRANCISCO, CA I'm a full-stack web developer at Yelp, and I definitely recommend the hell out of working here. We've still got the startup environment (kegs, dog, etc); we're located in downtown San Francisco, half a block from MoMa; we are in a unique position to do great stuff and solve hard problems while helping people find great local businesses. I built our "Hot New Businesses" feature - http://yelp.com/openings/sf , for instance, you can find it on the homepage and in our mobile apps too - which crunches through our data nightly and generates a list of the most recently opened bars and restaurants in your city, complete with predictions of the day they opened on. It's a really useful feature, and we have so much data that I was able to build it without knowing anything about machine learning, data-mining, etc; imagine the crazy-useful stuff you could do here, if a knucklehead like me could make a feature like this. For more info about what it's like to work here as an engineer, see a Q&A with me at http://officialblog.yelp.com/2011/07/day-in-the-life-of-a-ye.... , or feel free to contact me at jrheard at yelp dot com. Here's a list of our open engineering positions: Web Developer ☆ Develop cool and useful features for our 61M+ monthly visitors ☆ Expertise in JavaScript, HTTP, HTML/DOM, and CSS, as well as server-side chops in a language like Python, Ruby, Java, C++, etc. We're on Python, but we're just looking for people who are…

If that doesn't convince you, how about this independent study showing that Yelp's filtering algorithm doesn't treat advertisers' reviews differently than non-advertisers'? http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-yelp-extort…

Debunked many many times. Michael Luca at HBS is one such study. Sales at Yelp has no ability to influence reviews, and Yelp employees are not allowed to even write reviews anymore. http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-yelp-extort…

For some businesses, Yelp puts a big consumer alert on their business page when they catch the businesses soliciting reviews on craigslist or whatever: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2012/10/consumer-alerts-because-you-might…

Whoops, wrong link (on my phone, still no excuse). Here is the one I was referring to: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-yelp-extort… The myth is that businesses which pay yelp do better; thus yelp extorts businesses to pay. The study showed that businesses which pay for yelp ads do no better.

> Whoever wants to replace OpenTable needs to replace all of this at once. Not only that, they need to convince a restaurant to ditch practically their entire IT stack, retrain all of their employees in the new system, and do so without service or quality interruption. Yelp acquired SeatMe[0] (front of house management) last year to expand into this market, and Yelp Reservations[1] was launched last month. These two products combined function as an OpenTable replacement. Disclaimer: I work at Yelp. [0] https://www.seatme.yelp.com/ [1] http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/05/yelp-reservations-new-free-tool-f…

Thank you, but to be precise it is: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/01/protecting-consumer-free-speech-i…

Well, it really kicked off in ~2009 when this story popped: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-extorti… Many owners alleged that they received cold calls from Yelp about negative reviews, offering refuge in exchange for buying advertising on yelp. Yelp didn't have much to say short of denials, but rumours of it ran pretty rampant. Here's a recent response to them by yelp: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/05/no-yelp-doesnt-extort-small-busin… Of course, business owners are alleging foul play in the black box filtering algorithm, not the deletion per say, but that's sort of how the rumour evolved anyway. Too much shit has being thrown at yelp, and admittingly not all of it has stuck, but I wouldn't trust anything on there. I don't trust their black box.

Yelp's response: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/02/lady-justice-needs-a-lawsuit-filt…

No, they can't. http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-east-bay-expres… http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/east-bay-express-story-starts-to-…

Yelp's response: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-east-bay-expres… Also, their founder has been active on twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremys

To me it's really that Wordpress developers / community are not taking mobile seriously. Poorly mobile optimized themes are just a symptom of the problem. The consequence is a generation of Mobile developers are ignoring Wordpress, at least in their apps. Wordpress needs to have a drop-in SDK that allows content from an app developers blog to be displayed in a friendly way in-app, plus push notifications / badges etc. to inform users of new content. How do you tell users about new features in your app for example? Then there are some deeper questions to answer like blog comments - do they make sense on mobile at all? Most people aren't going to write more than a sentence on their phone. What about finding different ways to provide feedback? Yelp for example spend a long time soul-searching about whether to allow reviews from mobile - http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap-yelp-app-now-post-reviews… - I don't think they found the answer but they certainly saw the problem. But that's another story...

From Jeremy Stoppelman's written testimony, as posted on Yelp's blog (here: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2011/09/seeking-a-level-playing-field.htm… "In 2010, Google began incorporating the content that it indexed from its competitors into Google Local without permission. Although Google had previously acknowledged that it needed a license to use Yelp’s content, it was now using it without permission to prop up its own, less effective product. In some instances, Google even presented this content to its users as if it were its own. [See Exhibit C] Google’s Offers a False Choice In response to our objections, Google informed us that it would cease the practice only if we agreed to be removed from Google’s web search index, thereby preventing Yelp from appearing anywhere in Google web search results. This, of course, was a false choice. Google’s dominant position in the market prevents services like Yelp from exercising any sort of meaningful choice in the matter: it is a choice between allowing Google to co-opt one’s content and not competing at all."