Yelp : Restaurants, Nightlife and Shopping Reviews

If you need to find information about a restaurant, museum or any other attraction in your area, you should check Yelp.com. Though most people now use the site for local businesses and attractions, the founders created the site as a tool to help people find services. The website launched in 2004, and it originally had a focus on smaller businesses, including beauty salons, doctors, mechanics and dentists. The service now boasts a number of different features for registered users. The company claims that it now has more than 70 million visitors every month.

The page is a good choice for those who need to find a specific business in their area. Every day, thousands of visitors arrive at the site, looking for information and posting reviews. The review aspect is one of the greatest features of Yelp.com. When you read a review in a magazine or newspaper, you often read a biased review. The reviewer wants to encourage people to support local businesses, and the reviewer writes a recap that focuses on the benefits of that business. This website is completely different because it lets everyday people like you post reviews of businesses that they tried. More than 27 million reviews now appear on the site.

Reviewers create an account on the site, which they can link to their Facebook account. Every time the reviewer posts a new review, it appears on the Facebook page. There are multiple categories on Yelp.com, including restaurants, stores, pets, nightlife, spas, food and real estate. The front page lists the most popular attractions in the city where the user lives. You can see the overall average rating of the business, and you can read the reviews posted by others. Reviewers even have the option of uploading photographs that they took of the business. For example, a person might post photographs of the food received at a local restaurant.

Many people assume that Yelp focuses primarily on reviews, but the site boasts a number of different features. The chat function lets users talk about current topics, meet friends and discuss other issues on the website. The list option gives users the chance to post lists of the best restaurants or other businesses in their area. Some users post their favorite activities in a specific city. The site also has an events area, which lets you find upcoming festivals, concerts, gallery openings and other events taking place in a city of your choosing.

The site even has its own filtration system that removes duplicate reviews. You might see the same review on dozens of websites, but you won’t find the same review on this site because it removes those duplicate reviews. You can access Yelp.com from your computer or your smartphone, which is helpful when you need information while on the go.

Website: www.yelp.com

Vincent Abry

Blogger on Technology, Social Media, Marketing and Science.