'Yelp,' 3 Pros and 3 Cons to This Service

For those not familiar with Yelp I want to start with explaining the web site. The site is devoted to individual responses to businesses. Their business tag line is "Real People, Real Reviews". It is easy to see that they want John Q Public to be able to comment on businesses that they frequent. The web site encourages people to provide feedback form their own personal experience. I think that overall that the premise is a good one and it is safe to say that many people would agree, as they frequent this web site often, leaving their tidbits of wisdom behind them on the web site. The site in my opinion has its pros and cons like any other web site out on the web. For practicality purposes, I am going to limit my comments to 3 pros and 3 cons to this web site. Like everything, even the website Yelp, take all comments, suggestions, and critiques in stride and understand that they are from people with their own likes and dislikes.

I have narrowed my 3 Positive items to the following:

• Rating System and being able to use to find locations

• Price Margins and Comments

• Easy to use.

Yelp offers the ability to categorize businesses by a number of different criteria. There is of course the rating system from 0 to 5 (5 being the best). This star rating system can help you quickly narrow your search down quickly. When filtering for a business one can choose city information, driving distance, price, and features. This can be very helpful for someone visiting the area that is not familiar with the area. One can also filter by highest rating. For restaurants or food related businesses you can also select from Who accepts credit cards to is the location good for kids, or how the wait staff line up to if they offer take out. All these options only go to help you decide "what's for dinner?"

The next handy feature is the showing of price and number of available comments. One can easily see (by the number of dollar signs) how expensive a business is or what range is for a restaurant. Next one can read the comments and decide which comments apply to their circumstances. So for example if everyone says the pizza place has a great pie, but the delivery is consistently slow or not available and I want a pizza delivered, well I know right away to look elsewhere.

Finally, the web site is easy to navigate. There is a business type search text space as well as a location text space to help you find the business type in your location. I found that the time to perform a search was about average to other searches from other web sites. One can search by category, but I did not find that way as useful. Even with all the information that Yelp is trying to make available to each user, I think that they have done a good job with the layout so one does not feel overwhelmed.

Although I like the web site Yelp, I did find a few things that I did not appreciate as much. The cons to the web site are:

• The site needs more categories

• Cannot leave an anonymous review

• The Auto-fill can be annoying

In my opinion, I felt that the site needed more categories to choose from. I see the categories that I want when I do a search from the search text box, but when I go to find that category under the main list on the home page I am not finding that option. Sometimes I am in need of a certain category and I am not 100% what that category would be called. So I was hoping to find the category on the list.

The next hang-up I had was that I could not leave an anonymous comment. Sometimes one wants to leave a comment and you do not want to include who you are. Perhaps you know the person too well, so you want to leave a comment to help them see something about their business, but on the other hand, you don't want to hurt their feelings by them knowing It was someone that they know well.

Finally, I found the auto-fill annoying. Every time I tried to put in a business type the auto fill would kick in a differ phrase, one that I was not looking for. After three attempts to fix this, I just concluded that this was a feature that I cannot turn off. I still wish that I could have put in my original phrase easily, but that just does not seem the case with this product.

Overall, I like Yelp and think that it is a great tool to view other people's opinions so long as you remember that these are not professional opinions and that you will not agree with everyone.