For the past few months we’ve been working on revamping our API based off your feedback of wanting more Yelp data and functionality. Today, we’re excited to announce that the newest version of our API is entering developer preview.

What’s new?

We’re exposing two new features as part of the developer preview: autocomplete and transaction search.

As a user performs a search, autocomplete will help them find what they want (some might even say we have the ability to read their minds). With autocomplete, a user’s search experience will feel much more intuitive.

The API now exposes a search endpoint for businesses that let you order online, specifically food delivery. If you’re interested in working with businesses which deliver food to your users, then look no further! Any food delivery business available on Yelp (such as Eat24, ChowNow, Delivery.com and EatStreet) will be returned through this endpoint.

What’s changed?

By default, we’re also providing more business data. The business endpoint will now return hours, pricing, and 3 hi-res photos. A reviews endpoint has been added that’ll provide you with 3 review excerpts for a business from Yelp users.

Last but not least, we’ve updated the authentication for the API. The new API will use OAuth 2.0 to for all requests as opposed to OAuth 1.0 (we’ve seen all the emails and issues around OAuth 1.0). We’ve exposed a client credentials flow which will allow for simpler access to the API (no more invalid signature exceptions!).

We hope that the new design of the API has made it more powerful yet simpler for developers to use. The endpoint names, parameters, and responses should be easier to understand and overall much more consistent.

Under the hood

Our goal was to make building functionality easier for developers. We’ve rebuilt the API from the ground up - enabling us to take it out of the monolith - so we could make use of our platform as a service and distributed tracing systems. The result is faster deployment, iterations, and automatic scaling.

We’ll be sharing more on the work we put into the API in the coming months.

Get started now

Sign up here for access to the new Yelp API!

All documentation can be found on GitHub. If you have any feedback (bugs, feature requests, or random thoughts), please create a new issue on the repo or message me directly on Twitter (@zehtomer) or on Yelp’s engineering account (@YelpEngineering).

Check back to our blog and the Yelp Engineering Twitter account for additional updates coming out in the next few weeks!

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