Searching Yelp on a mass, non-city scale.

March 22, 2015 3:14 PM

How can I search Yelp by state, region, or country?

Yelp is all about rating place base on a specific geographical area, namely a city. What if I want to view rating by state or country? Is here an advanced search or plug-in or secondary site that will allow me to do that?

For example, what if I want to see the best Taco Trucks in California based on overall rating.

Also, to take it a step further, what if I want to see the best Taco Trucks in California based on overall rating, but only those with a minimum number of 100 reviews?

posted by bamassippi to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Yelp's search API doesn't support searching by state or country; it does support searching by a geographical bounding box (specified by SW and NE corners) and by latitude and longitude (plus radius, max 25 miles).

If you were a programmer you could probably cobble together a program that would read the US state TIGER shape files generated by the census bureau and extract state boundaries, then repeatedly query the Yelp API until you'd covered the entire state... but you're probably not, and paying someone else to do it is probably cost prohibitive unless you really care about tacos.
posted by axiom at 3:51 PM on March 22, 2015

You don't need to be a programmer, you could probably build this query on either Kimono Labs or Import.io yourself.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:36 AM on March 23, 2015