Dive briefs:
- Yelp has rolled out several enhancements to its restaurant discovery process and reviews, the company said in a press release Tuesday.
- The company introduced two search features, “Surprise Me” and “Clickable Category Tags,” to help consumers find stores and restaurants without having a specific brand in mind. It also debuted more interactive and visual review he options, including allowing customers to add videos.
- These restaurant-specific additions are part of over a dozen feature releases. Artificial intelligence and large-scale language models to improve the relevance of search results.
Dive Insight:
These modern search tools align with Yelp’s commitment to increasing the relevance of search results and the value of reviews. Yelp recently improved the specificity of its results by adding a “Veteran Owned” tag last fall and a green search filter in April 2022.
The Surprise Me feature generates a list of recommended restaurants for customers wondering where to eat. According to the press release, clickable category tags are intended to generate more specific information by limiting results to specific categories such as restaurants, food, and nightlife. Both search features are currently available on iOS and will be coming to the Android operating system in the coming months.
The company has also added functionality to its review process. According to the press release, customers can now embed videos in their iOS reviews. Yelp is also adding suggested topics like “food,” “service,” and “ambiance” to its review-writing process on both iOS and Android. The company says this makes reviews more specific.
In addition to its search and review capabilities, Yelp uses an extensive language model to identify and highlight relevant sections of reviews and display them below your business listing. It also uses artificial intelligence to suggest businesses across the United States rather than a customer’s specific geographic location.
Other companies are also using Buzzy AI and large-scale language model techniques to improve suggestions and relevance. OpenTable recently announced a partnership with ChatGPT, which offers restaurant recommendations and reservations, but it’s unclear how that tool will address the fact-inventing trend in generative AI. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, such inventions are driven by AI’s reliance on algorithmic generation to produce plausible answers based on large datasets, limiting the usefulness of such techniques. There is likely to be.
