Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Yelp Adds Health Inspection Scores to Local Restaurant Reviews ...

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If you?re a restaurant owner, it?s time to get serious about keeping your kitchen and dining areas in tip-top shape. Yelp has added publicly available?health inspection data as a business attribute to local restaurant reviews, which will enable diners to view a restaurant?s inspection history and violations.

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The new health inspection scores shouldn?t be taken lightly. The scores are featured prominently at the very top of the restaurant attributes and the violations are detailed by date on a separate page.?To a casual diner who is not familiar with the inner workings of the restaurant industry and the severity of each violation, the listed violations can make or break whether they?ll ever dine at the restaurant again.

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In addition to surfacing the hygiene inspection data to the public, the ratings and reviews local business directory worked with the San Francisco and New York technology departments to develop a new open data standard called?LIVES (Local Inspector Value-entry Specification), which was guided by and given a blessing by the White House. That?s bad news for shady restaurants, but great news for diners. This means that Yelp and its government partners have created and agreed upon a consistent data structure, so that other cities across the U.S. use it as a blue print for their own data upload.

Public/private partnerships like this don?t necessarily provide a direct contribution to Yelp?s bottom line, but evidence suggests the LIVES open data standard will have a positive impact on society.

According to a study of the Los Angeles restaurant industry, when consumers have better exposure to restaurant hygiene scores, the number of hospitalizations due to foodborne illness drops. The LA study also demonstrated that when restaurant scores are posted conspicuously, best practices improve across the industry.

We hope other cities will join San Francisco in fully embracing this new open data standard.

-Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO at Yelp

The new inspection data will be available on Yelp restaurant profiles in San Francisco and New York, but restaurant owners in Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago better clean up their establishments fast as they?re next on the list of cities to launch.

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To contact the writer on this story: Philip Nowak in Chicago at philip.nowak@firmology.com. Please?contact us?if you?d like to?submit a small business innovation story or small business tech startup, product or service.

Written by Philip Nowak

Philip Nowak is the founder of Firmology, a?small business news?and information media company focused on helping small business owners grow their business through technology and innovation.?You can find Philip on?Google+,?Twitter?and?LinkedIn.

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Source: http://www.firmology.com/2013/01/21/yelp-adds-health-inspection-scores-to-local-restaurant-reviews/

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