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Yelp Search

Definition

Yelp Search is Yelp's production local-business-discovery search stack: retrieval + ranking over the Yelp business catalog (millions of local businesses + associated reviews, photos, hours, categories, locations) constrained by geolocation (the geobox — the rectangular latlong region to search within) and user-supplied query text.

Wiki anchor

The wiki's canonical anchor for Yelp Search is its consumption of Yelp Query Understanding outputs, disclosed in the 2025-02-04 Yelp Engineering post (sources/2025-02-04-yelp-search-query-understanding-with-llms).

Two named consumer-integration points from that post:

  1. Geobox rewriting via implicit query location rewrite — when query segmentation tags a {location} segment with high confidence, the search backend narrows its geobox from the user-supplied location to the segmentation-extracted location (within 30 miles). Canonical example: "Epcot restaurants" rewrites from "Orlando, FL" to "Epcot, Bay Lake, FL" so the geolocation system targets the theme-park latlong.
  2. Business-name matching + ranking — the token probability of the segmentation {name} tag is used as a continuous feature by Yelp's query-to-business-name matching
  3. ranking subsystem.

Not deeply disclosed in the 2025-02-04 post, but contextually:

  • Review-highlight rendering — the post's other running example; Yelp Search results are rendered with short review snippets matching the user's query via the phrase-expansion output.
  • Filter auto-enablement — mentioned as a downstream benefit of segmentation tags, not fully detailed.

Caveats

  • Stub. The 2025-02-04 post is entirely about the query-understanding layer; it does not disclose Yelp Search's retrieval or ranking internals. This page exists as a minimal anchor for the two named consumer integrations. Future Yelp ingests can extend this page with internals as they become public.

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