It’s Yelp’s 10 year anniversary. Since 2004, Yelp has been collecting online reviews of businesses around the world. Yelp has logged reviews from users in nearly 100 cities and more than 20 countries. With over 57 million reviews collected over the 10 year period, there is a wealth of information to be mined from the content of these online reviews.
Yelp’s newest tool is Yelp Trends. Similar to Google Trends, Yelp Trends makes it easy to compare the occurrence of up to three keywords appearing in Yelp reviews over the past 10 years. The example below compares the popularity of the running, cross fit and yoga keywords in Atlanta since 2006.
According a Yelp blog post, “Our massive wealth of data and the high quality reviews contributed by the Yelp community are what allow us to surface consumer trends and behavior based on ten years of experiences shared by locals around the world. For example, are San Franciscans still sipping PBR or craving craft beer? Is the CrossFit fad still going strong or losing steam? Are Londoners loving bob hairstyles or feeling more fringe (that’s bangs, for you Americans) these days? And every city has its favorite food trucks now, but where did this meals-on-wheels phenomenon first take off?”
Data for Yelp Trends is gathered from the full text of Yelp reviews. The current release of Trends does not allow for the comparison of a single trend in two locations.
Check out Yelp Trends here.