Simon Willison’s Weblog

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5 items tagged “yelp”

2013

Why doesn’t Yelp require a login? Is there evidence that suggests that acquiring users at the engagement stage versus initial landing is effective in specific markets?

Unnecessarily requiring a login to browse is (in my opinion) dumb. It discourages people from sharing links to content on the surface and can prevent search engines from indexing content, both of which are terrible for SEO. It also puts a pointless barrier in front of people who are trying to figure out if your service is any use, and encourages fake signups which pointlessly pollute your user database.

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Which is the most complete and up to date API for restaurants/nightlife?

The foursquare API is pretty great for restaurants and nightlife these days. No chance if revenue share though—how would you envisage revenue share working?

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2010

mrjob: Distributed Computing for Everybody. Yelp use MapReduce with Hadoop (running on Amazon’s EMR service) to power all sorts of interesting features on the site, including spelling suggestions, review highlights, top searches and “people who viewed X also viewed...”. mrjob is their new open source Python framework for writing MapReduce jobs against the Hadoop streaming API. # 29th October 2010, 11:55 pm

How much does it cost to develop a website like Yelp or Groupon?

You’re probably asking the wrong question. The initial build phase of a site like Yelp (the bit before launch) is just the start of the process—once the site has launched, it will certainly need to evolve based on how the site’s users are using it. You can’t just pay a bunch of developers to build it and then launch it without expecting to keep working on it.

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2007

Minako Organic Japanese Restaurant. On 18th and Mission in San Francisco. We ate there this evening—the meal took three hours and was worth every minute. # 19th April 2007, 8:38 am