Yelp

Yelp is a platform that connects people with local businesses through crowd-sourced reviews, ratings, and business information. For custom web application development, the Yelp Fusion API provides access to business search, reviews, photos, and detailed business information including hours, location, categories, and pricing. This is valuable when building local business directories, restaurant recommendation engines, real estate neighborhood analysis tools, or any application that needs to surface information about nearby businesses. The Yelp API is particularly useful for restaurant and hospitality applications because Yelp's review data is among the most comprehensive in the food and dining category.

Before It Existed

Yelp was founded in July 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, both former employees of PayPal. The original concept was actually an email-based referral network where users would email friends asking for local business recommendations. The team built the referral feature and also added a review feature almost as an afterthought. The referral feature flopped, but the reviews took off. Users loved writing and reading reviews about local businesses, and the team pivoted to make reviews the core product. Stoppelman has credited the pivot to listening to what users actually wanted rather than clinging to the original idea. Yelp went public in 2012.

What Makes It Different

Yelp's recommendation software, which filters reviews it considers unreliable, has been the subject of enormous controversy and multiple lawsuits. The algorithm suppresses reviews it considers fake or biased, but the criteria are opaque, and some legitimate reviews get caught in the filter. Yelp has disclosed that at any given time, roughly 25 to 30 percent of submitted reviews are filtered and not counted toward a business's star rating. Business owners have long complained that positive reviews seem to disappear while negative ones remain, though Yelp maintains the algorithm is unbiased. Despite the controversy, no court has ever found that Yelp manipulates reviews to pressure businesses into buying advertising.

Visit: yelp.com