At Yelp, we solve a lot of different information retrieval problems ranging from highlighting reviews for businesses to recommending nearby restaurants. We recently improved one system called business matching, moving from a naive ranking function to a machine learned approach using Learn to Rank. The Business Matching Problem Business matching is a system that accepts a description of a business (e.g. name, location, phone number) and returns the Yelp businesses that description best fits. We can use this in several different contexts. For example, in 2012 Yelp announced a partnership spearheaded by the City of San Francisco to allow municipalities...

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While we’re all still recovering from our Thanksgiving-induced food comas, we wanted to share some of our upcoming events for December! This Thursday, some of our engineers will be giving lightning talks at the Women Who Code meetup so make sure to come! We’re also very excited to be sponsoring the Women Who Code Holiday Party in Waterloo Ontario on December 11th. If you’re in the area, RSVP and stop by! For the rest of the week (through December 5th), Yelp will also be matching donations to Women Who Code (up to $5,000 total). Please consider donating and helping them...

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We recently held the 15th edition of Hackathon, a two-day event comprising of pure, unadulterated hacking, innovation, creativity and fun. Folks clustered together, hammering on their keyboards, scribbling on whiteboards, and some electrical engineers were plugging away on their breadboards. The kitchens were filled with delicious catered food, and fresh fruits and snacks lined up in the common spaces. We even had a school of remote-controlled sharks lurking around the office and taking over the meeting rooms. Those ominous-looking RC sharks do not seem to deter our intrepid hackers! Close to 60 great projects came out of the event from...

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Yelp uses Elasticsearch to rapidly prototype and launch new search applications, and moving quickly at our scale raises challenges. In particular, we often encounter difficulty making changes to query logic without impacting users, as well as finding client library bugs, problems with multi-tenancy, and general reliability issues. As the number of engineers at Yelp writing new Elasticsearch queries grew, our Search Infrastructure team was having difficulty supporting the multitude of ways engineers were finding to send queries to our Elasticsearch clusters. The infrastructure we designed for a single team to communicate with a single cluster did not scale to tens...

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This month we have a handful of exciting events and a few new ones! We kicked off the month with Hackathon 15.0 where Yelpers created and shared some amazing projects (more on that in a few weeks!). Now that the hackathon dust has settled, we’re starting off by hosting the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner to help encourage networking between girl geeks. On top of that, we’ll be at AnDevCon November 18 - 21 so make sure to find us there too. Events happening at Yelp HQ: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 5:30PM - Yelp Girl Geek Dinner ( Bay...

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Yelp Dataset Challenge Round 3 Winners We recently opened the fourth round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge. This announcement included an update to the dataset, adding four new international cities and bringing the total number of reviews in the dataset to over one million. You can download it and participate in the challenge here. Submissions for this round are open until December 31, 2014. See the full terms for more details. With the opening of our fourth iteration of the challenge, we closed the third round, which ran from February 1, 2014 to July 31, 2014. We are proud to announce...

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Welcome back! Today we have Wei, Rachel, Jen, Virginia and Anusha sharing their experiences. Wei is an engineer on the consumer team and she brings amazing user experiences to our customers. Rachel and Jen are both engineers on our international team, bringing the power of Yelp to all of our international communities. Virginia works as an engineer on our partnerships team and Anusha is an engineer on our infrastructure team. Overall, we all had a blast getting to know each other, meeting other amazing women in the industry, hearing some great stories from inspiring women role models, and sourcing some...

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As you probably heard, Yelp attended Grace Hopper this year. Nine software engineers from different teams attended and, for many of us, it was our first time. It was a unique experience to see so many talented women in one place. In addition to the talks and panel discussions, we also had the opportunity and pleasure to represent Yelp at the career fair. It was amazing to see a consistent flow of students and industry talent, all happy customers, stop by our booth to speak with us and tell us their stories of using Yelp. We had such a great...

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