Yelp Introduces 'Asian-Owned Business' Search Filter

The business review app Yelp has added “Asian-owned” to its list of available company profile attributes in an attempt to promote Asian businesses.

SearchEngineLand reports that the restaurant and business review app Yelp has added “Asian-owned” to its list of available business profile attributes. The company said in a statement this week:

With the escalation of anti-Asian hate crimes and violence we’ve seen across the nation during the pandemic, there’s never been a more important time to support the Asian American community.

According to Yelp’s Local Economic Impact Report, in February 2021 overall searches for women, Asian, Black, and Latino-owned businesses were up by 2,930 percent compared to February 2020. On Yelp, searches for Asian-owned businesses increased by 130 percent year-over-year for the same period.

Breitbart News previously reported on the introduction of Yelp’s Black-owned business tag, writing:

Business review site Yelp announces that it will provide a special search feature on its platform so that users can limit their results to black-owned businesses.

“We see you. We support you,” said Yelp in its announcement that it will build a feature to let businesses “to identify themselves as Black-owned” on the site. Yelp says that its goal is to “make it easy for users to find and support Black-owned businesses on Yelp.”

“Our country has a long and fraught history of systemic oppression and anti-Black racism that we have shamefully not yet come close to overcoming,” wrote Yelp Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson in an email to the company’s subscribers.

Johnson’s remarks arrive in the wake of nationwide protests which have devolved into violent riots over the death of George Floyd in police custody.

In October 2020, Yelp introduced a “business accused of racist behavior” consumer alert. Following the launch of the alert, a temporary halt was placed on new reviews to prevent profiles from being flooded with non-customer reviews objecting to the accusations of racism.

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