Yelp's company blog posts announcements and responses on review filtering, advertising practices, and product changes.
HN links it for Yelp's official responses on fake review filtering, data sharing, and product features; commenters discuss how well its review system works.
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…
From Jeremy Stoppelman's written testimony, as posted on Yelp's blog (here: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2011/09/seeking-a-level-playing-field.html):
"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."
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-straight-from-your-mobile-device.html - I don't think they found the answer but they certainly saw the problem. But that's another story...
Well, it really kicked off in ~2009 when this story popped: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635
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-businesses-see-for-yourself.html
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.
> 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-for-businesses-gives-diners-even-more-options-when-booking-online.html
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)?