Mining local businesses on Yelp
Yelp is an online service that hosts crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses, such as bars and restaurants (https://www.yelp.com). Visited by 135 million monthly users, its content is mainly community-driven.
Yelp offers three APIs that can be used to search for and interact with data about local businesses. The three APIs are grouped depending on their purpose. The search API is the entry point for keyword-based search. The business API is used to look for information about a specific business. The phone search API is used to search for a business by phone number.
The Yelp API has the rate limit of 25,000 calls per day.
This section describes the basic steps to set up an application that searches the Yelp database for particular keywords.
The access to the APIs is protected by tokens. The first step to access any of the APIs, after registering an account on Yelp, is to obtain the tokens on the developers' website (https://www.yelp.com/developers). Figure...