Introduction to Yelp [clone]

What is Yelp?

Yelp provides a one-stop platform for consumers to discover, connect, and transact with local businesses. Users can join a waitlist, make a reservation, schedule an appointment, or purchase easily. It also provides information, photos, and reviews about local businesses.

The user provides the name of a place or GPS location, and the system finds nearby restaurants, cinemas, tourism spots, etc. The user can also upload their opinions in the form of text, pictures, or ratings for a place they visited. Other location-based services include Foursquare and Google NearBy.

Services based on proximity servers are helpful in finding nearby attractions such as restaurants, theatres, or recreational areas. Designing such a system is challenging as we have to efficiently find all the possible places in a given radius with minimum latency. It means we have to narrow down all locations in the world (which could be in billions) and find the relevant ones only.