Yelp / Nearby Places — Notes

Functional

• Search places by category + name + location.
• Place detail (hours, photos, reviews, menus).
• Write review, upload photo.
• Check-in, reservations integration.
• Owner tools.

Non-functional

• p99 nearby search < 300 ms.
• 99.95% availability.
• Read-heavy (50:1).

Capacity

• 200M+ places globally; 200M+ reviews.
• Photos in TB-PB range.

Schema

• places(id, name, geo, category, hours, owner_id, rating_avg, review_count)
• reviews(id, place_id, user_id, text, rating, photos[], ts, is_filtered)
• geo_index(cell_id, [place_id])

Trade-offs

• Quadtree vs geohash vs S2: S2 is sphere-aware, popular now.
• Filtered reviews: trust vs author goodwill.
• Personalization vs objective ranking: hybrid scoring.

Refs

• Yelp engineering blog (Mussel, search, Spam Filter).
• Google S2 docs; Uber H3 hexes.
• ByteByteGo "Design Yelp".