Yelp debuted a host of new features on Thursday, propping up the crowd-sourced reviews site as a more well-rounded hub for shaping as well as sharing consumer experiences.
First is the addition of Collections, providing users with what the company (YELP) describes as an easier method to create and share itineraries.
Jay Garg, a group product manager at Yelp, described Collections in a blog post as taking “the legwork out of finding great, new businesses by serving up personalized recommendations based on your activity on Yelp and amplifying top recommendations from across the Yelp community.”
To get started, users can draft a collection from scratch by selecting “Create New” in the Collections tab on mobile or web. Similar to how Foursquare users can create and follow “Lists,” Yelp users can add notes and descriptions to individual business locations saved in their Collections, either writing them more colorfully like a restaurant review or just a reminder as to why they might have saved the location to the collection in the first place.
But that’s not all. Like most social networks as well as sites that rely on crowd-sourced content from its users, Yelp wants to keep visitors around even longer.
To do so, Yelp will be relying on more machine learning technology to populate a new section called “Recommended For You.” Given that the terminology is already employed by everyone from YouTube to Amazon, the concept isn’t unique, but it could be quite helpful for users coming to Yelp to inspect one thing, find themselves disappointed, and yet still hungry for something else. Thus, Yelp will pump out more recommendations for users to discover and ponder over, with “fresh” recommendations promised each week.
Collections is now available via Yelp’s mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as the web.