Yelp Engineering and Product

Take a peek into our engineering and product teams and all the work we do.

Engineering News

Keep up with what we're up to and working on! Read our blog posts to see some of the technical problems we solve and keep up to date by following us on Twitter and Facebook.

Moving Yelp's Core Business Search to Elasticsearch

June 29, 2017 - Umesh Dangat, Software Engineer

While newer search engines at Yelp typically use Elasticsearch as a backend, Yelp’s core business search used its own custom backend, built directly on top of Lucene. This system was one of the oldest systems at Yelp to still be deployed in production. Some features of this custom search engine were Distributed Lucene instances Master-slave architecture Custom text analysis support for various languages Custom business ranking which relied mostly on using business features (think business attributes like reviews, name, hours_open, service_areas, etc.) Derived Yelp analytics data to improve quality of search results; e.g. most popular queries for a business Problems...

Upcoming Deprecation of Yelp API v2

June 28, 2017 - Quy L., Product Mananger

As we continue to invest in the Yelp Fusion API, we are announcing that Yelp API v2 will be discontinued on June 30, 2018. If you are currently using v2 API endpoints, you have until June 30, 2018 to move them over to the Yelp Fusion API. We hope this gives everyone sufficient time to transition your applications from Yelp API v2 to Yelp Fusion, giving you the ability to tap into awesome new features like GraphQL, which we launched last month. Here is a summary of the Yelp API v2 sunset timeline: April 1, 2017 - Disabled Yelp API...

Yelp Dataset Challenge Round 8 Winner

June 23, 2017 - Sébastien C., Data Scientist

Yelp Dataset Challenge Round 8 Winners The eighth round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge ran throughout the first half of 2017 and, as usual, we received a large number of very impressive and interesting submissions. Today, we are proud to announce the grand prize winner of the $5,000 award: “Clustered Model Adaption for Personalized Sentiment Analysis” by Lin Gong, Benjamin Haines, and Hongnin Wang (from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Virginia). The authors built a personalized sentiment classification model at the group level. Their model is based on social theories about group psychology and how human...