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20 years of five stars.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts.

20 years ago in 2004, Yelp was launched, the name being a mashup of Help and Yellow Pages. It started as an email

service to send personal recommendations to your friends. Then in 2005, morphed into the

standalone review site we now know. Yelp wasn't the first in the online review game, but it has

been among the most popular and enduring.

Andrea Rubin has been at the company almost from the beginning.

She joined in 2006 as the first community manager in Chicago.

She's now the senior vice president for community nationally.

I absolutely loved my city and loved local businesses, and I just loved being

able to share my thoughts on these local businesses through the Yelp platform. And I was like,

well, if I love this, I know there's many other people who are going to love it as well.

The site has now accrued almost 300 million reviews worldwide. And it's helped usher in our current

star-saturated era, says David Goddus, a marketing and economics professor at Johns Hopkins.

Almost all of us, almost always, check reviews when we're making a purchase.

More than 90% of consumers do, according to a recent survey from Capital One.

But as online reviews have taken on greater weight, there's been a greater incentive to game them.

I guess you could think of it as white hat and black hat.

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