Whenever my family and I get into one of those situations where we don’t know the best restaurants to eat at, what do we do? Go to Yelp. That’s right, I found Yelp so useful that I wanted to figure out how it worked!

If you don’t know this helpful website, it is a review company where you can find recommendations on just about everything to visit. Although Yelp isn’t just about restaurants, 42% of the businesses on Yelp are in this popular search category. Speaking of people, Yelp wouldn’t be what it is now without them. The Yelp employees don’t WRITE ANY comments, the public does! The reason someone would write a negative review for an organization is because they want to complain to the business. Some people write positive reviews to build a social status with online users and the restaurant. It makes them feel good, and they have concern for others like me who don’t know where to go.

I know what you are thinking, if Yelp is made up of random people, how do they make money? Basically, they advertise higher search result spots for lots of money using CPA. So if your company needs help, you can get traffic to your site by buying one of these spots. Yelp also gains money through putting regular ads on the sides, bottom, and top of the page. In fact, most Yelp employees go around asking organizations (especially restaurants) if they want to be on Yelp. This type of advertising extremely convenient for restaurants since search results only show 10 options per page, and if you are not on that top ten, there is a really good chance that your company may never get looked at. Unfortunately, you can’t just pay money to achieve better reviews and ratings, so even if you did get a good search result spot, you would need both a great search result spot AND some complimentary reviews to get a lot of people.

I have to say though, out of all the times I have visited Yelp in my lifetime, about 80% of the first search results were actually good. I highly doubted that because a Korean restaurant right next to (oh let’s say…) To-Bang could just go on Yelp and post a horrible review for To-Bang to attract attention to their place. For example, I doubt that Betty J. has even eaten at McDonalds, because she only has one review post. Also, she doesn’t have a profile picture, so she might be trying to hide the fact that she is a competitor of McDonalds.

                    In addition to this, I also wrote a sample review to test out the system.

The part that makes Yelp so convenient is because they have filters which range from price to location to category. This makes it easy for the user to find the exact thing they want without anything being too complicated. Yelp makes your search results so precise with filtering that most users often are happy with their options. That signifies that Yelp is a good and working business.

Though I have learned about the basics of Yelp, one question still remains a mystery for me. How does Yelp inform its users that some restaurants are better than others when there are so many people who write bad reviews just to get more money?

Just remember, if you need help, go to Yelp.