Yelp

Yelp Now Lets You Message Your Grievances Directly to Businesses

In a move that will probably backfire instantly thanks to the always lovely denizens of the internet, Yelp is now allowing you to send messages directly to business owners. All of your questions, comments, and trolls can now directly filter into the inbox of the restaurant or plumber or day care you would like to…

Your Yelp Complaints Are Being Used to Track Food Poisoning in NYC

You wake up and there is definitely something wrong with your stomach. Could it be the tacos last night? Oh man, it was definitely the tacos at that dirty joint. So what do you do? You whine about your diarrhea on Yelp as a warning to would-be taco eaters. And now, the health department might…

Yelp is going to let users upload 3-12 second videos to support their reviews from early June. The idea is to give other users a sense of the establishment’s ambience—or, you know, cockroach infestation.

Oh Good, Yelp Now Suggests Businesses Based on Emoji

Emoji is strangely useful, whether you’re recapping wildly popular TV shows or sending your friend a smiling pile of poo when real words fail you. Until now, this lexicon was probably inscrutable to machines. Those days are over: Yelp’s mobile app now suggests businesses when you type tiny pictures in the search bar. A Yelp…

The best restaurant in the USA is a tiny shack in Hawaii

Were you expecting to see a Michelin Star restaurant? Something like Per Se? Certainly a restaurant where fine dining doesn’t even begin to describe the orgasmic experience, right? Like Alinea? Nope. Those excellent restaurants—and others of their kind—are not the best restaurant in the USA according to Yelp. That honor would go to a small…

Citymaps: This Is Your Maps App Replacement

Google Maps is pretty great. So is Foursquare and Yelp and Instagram. Now imagine combining the best of all those and what you get is Citymaps. It’s a brand new type of map for iOS that lets you explore what’s around you and share it with friends. Trust me, this is actually pretty neat and…

You can now order food for delivery and pickup directly through Yelp. There’s no threat to your pal Seamless just yet—Yelp’s service is only available at a few places in New York and San Francisco for now. But it will roll out to other cities in the next few months.

Where Hipsters Eat, Visualized

You probably turn to Yelp to look for single, stand-out restaurants and businesses. But there’s a lot of data inside all those reviews, which can make for fascinating analysis—letting you spot trends across geographic locations. This map, for instance, shows where the word “hipster” crops up across NYC reviews—and hey, look, Williamsburg wins out! But…

Buried under all of today’s shenanigans is a rather significant update for Yelp’s mobile apps, which promise to serve up better suggestions under the Nearby tab. For now, the iOS version will recommend venues based on your “location, previous check-ins and reviews” and other stuff like the weather and time of day. [Yelp]

TripWhat: All the Travel Data You Need Sucked Into One Little App

Traveling, even when its meant to relax, can be an immensely overwhelming experience. And sifting through the endless sea of apps supposedly meant to “ease” the process doesn’t exactly help the situation. TripWhat, however, takes those apps you already know and love and combines them to make one, comprehensive conglomerate of an app that takes…

Yelp is adding hygiene scores to restaurant reviews in New York and San Francisco. But d’you really want to know? [Yelp]

Who Does Facebook Search Screw the Most?

Graph Search, which we’re going to call Facebook search from here on out because nobody wants to read or write “Graph Search,” is a dramatic new way to browse Facebook. But its implications spill over its rivals—which companies lose the most? https://gizmodo.com/heres-what-using-the-new-facebook-search-looks-like-5976201 It’s hard to give Facebook’s new search engine a fair appraisal, because it’s…

Foursquare now shows a 1-10 rating for places in its newly updated iOS app. Your move, Yelp.

Yelp Will Now Warn You About Paid Reviews

Think the overly generous five-star rating of that god awful burger joint in your neighborhood is a bunch of bull? If Yelp suspects reviews are paid for, it will now post a warning sign. Going forward, when Yelp discovers these acts of bribery, it will put up a red alert on that business’s page. The…

How Yelp Scores Make or Break Restaurants

Smart diners rely on restaurant reviews to find good food. But a new study investigates for the first time the complex relationships between online ratings and real-world success—and reveals that losing just half a star can leave a restaurant in ruin. The Guardian reports that a team of economists from the University of California, Berkeley,…

Would You Trust Yelp Reviews With Your Life?

Yelp is a great way to weed out the lousy dry cleaners from the pros and locate various services in your area—but just how much should we be relying on the user reviews that keep this site alive? Would you go through Yelp to find a new doctor? Where do you draw the line of…

Bloomberg: Apple Chooses Lamest Partner for iOS 6 Maps

Bloomberg says Apple will include locational checkins with its new homemade Maps app, no extra app download needed. That’s actually very cool! Except it will allegedly use Yelp, and it’s hard to imagine a dumber choice. There’s a decent chance you didn’t know Yelp even offers Foursquare-style checkins, and that’s okay—nobody uses it. Yelp is…

Yelp for iOS Has Added Support for New Country, Amercia

It seems Yelp’s latest update for iOS has added, among other app-wide improvements, support for Mitt Romney’s spirit nation, Amercia. Amercia—land of the free, home of the free to review restaurants, shopping, nightlife, entertainment, and more. [Thanks, @GannonBurgett]

The Easiest, Most Trigger-Happy Way to Complain About Your Lousy Meal

Leaving a nasty Yelp review seems practically pointless, now that there’s an SMS service connecting cranky customers directly to a restaurant’s owner/s and management staff. TalkToTheManager is a new subscription app service that allows restaurants to receive realtime text messages from complaining (or complimentary!) customers, as they dine. After registering, the restaurant is given a…

Foursquare Adds Restaurant Menus as It Looks to Eat Yelp For Lunch

You’d think that Yelp, purveyor of social food recommendations, would have menu listings for each spot. Guess what? They don’t. But starting today, Foursquare users will be able to do exactly that. Yelp should be scared. Powered by SinglePlatform, an online service for businesses to upload and maintain their menus, the menu feature will be…