At Yelp, we use categories for businesses to help determine search results, improve search relevance, inform our users of what a business does, as well as help our sales team target groups of businesses. For example, Starbucks is categorized as Coffee & Tea, and Walgreens stores are often categorized as both Drugstores and Convenience Stores.   A number of our businesses don’t have categories, but they do hold other clues which can be used to infer categories. They tend to be businesses with relatively few reviews and photos, since more popular businesses would have eventually been assigned a category by...

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Thousands of businesses use Yelp SeatMe every day to manage their seating and reservations. Having a stable system is incredibly important to us, given how critical this system is to many businesses. This blog post is going to dive into how we use Docker to reliably develop and deploy Yelp SeatMe. Docker is an incredibly powerful productivity booster and has simplified our deployment pipeline. Hopefully, from this post, you’ll understand how to do it for your team. First, we’ll give a little bit of background on what Yelp SeatMe is, how it’s developed, and deployed. What is Yelp SeatMe? Restaurants...

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6. An impressive number. It’s 1 x 2 x 3 AND 1 + 2 + 3. It’s brilliant AND the number of degrees of freedom a rigid object has to move in three dimensions. It’s where we are in the history of the Yelp Academic Dataset challenge. We’ve had 5 rounds, hundreds of academic papers written, and we are excited to go at it again. Our dataset for this iteration includes information about local businesses in 10 cities across 4 countries. This dataset contains 1.6M reviews and 500K tips by 366K users for 61K businesses. It also comes with rich...

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Most of July was spent ramping up for our internal hackathon so it was a little slower for us. Last month, we hosted a small PyLadies workshop and celebrated the Designers + Geeks 4 year anniversary (2.5 years of which have been hosted at Yelp!). We also had Tera- Nicholle Nelson, the VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal and Under Armour, stop by our office to discuss how to “disrupt” yourself. Since hackathon recently wrapped up, we’re slowly recovering from dinosaurs, hacking, and our food comas (look out for our official hackathon post coming out soon!). Coming up this month, we’ve...

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It’s the battle of our generation - iPhone vs. Android - and Yelp has some novel data on what makes these devices different. Users of both are aligned in their passion of using Yelp to find restaurants as well as nightlife, plumbers and even dentists. However, when we dug into the search queries, some interesting differences were revealed - some stereotypical (brunch, Starbucks, cheap, luxury, whole foods/organic), some not so much (beer vs. wine, ramen vs. steaks). Regardless of the differences, we discovered some things for certain: everyone loves sushi, pizza, and delivery of all kinds! Let’s start with a...

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Over the years Yelp has built cool integrations with partners such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others that have enabled users to interact with our rich dataset in unique ways. One of the methods we’ve used to achieve these integrations is by building a robust, scalable data feeds system, which contains information for over 50 million businesses. As we allow partners to have their own configurations, information included in these feeds may vary from one partner to another and we did not have an easy way to access the history of data feeds that were delivered to our partners....

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Dynamically loaded images are a cornerstone of many Android applications. At Yelp, images are critical to how we connect consumers with great businesses. As network connections and device hardware have become more powerful, the quantity and quality of images that users have come to expect has continued to increase. Images can easily become the largest consumer of device memory and network data, and handling the downloading and management of this data becomes a daunting task. We explored several solutions to this problem, and ultimately decided that Glide provided a great combination of performance, ease of use, and a robust feature...

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Savvy developers like you already know that the Yelp API is the best place to get information on local businesses. Today, as a part of our on-going integration with our friends at both Yelp SeatMe and Yelp Eat24, we are excited to announce an additional feature of the API: “Action Links.” Action Links will allow your users to directly make a reservation or even start a food order for delivery or pickup from wherever you’re displaying Yelp data. To see this in action (pardon the pun), next time you use the Search endpoint or the Business endpoint, simply pass in...

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