KUALA LUMPUR, May 7 — Banking on the high usage of mobile devices in Malaysia, review site Yelp went live in the country today, launching its 31st localised website and mobile app in the hopes of being the site of choice for brick-and-mortar business reviews.

Yelp vice president of new markets Miriam Warren said the US-based site, which publishes user-submitted reviews about local businesses, is distinct from the other review sites popular in Malaysia because it allows users to review any kind of businesses that has a physical presence here, and not just a specific category.

“Lots of people think about Yelp as a restaurant or food site but, in fact, we are actually a lot more than that.

“Basically you can review anything on Yelp with a physical address including a public swimming pool, or a park, for you here in Malaysia, a mamak, which is one of the new categories we’ve started to create for Malaysia.

“Nasi lemak is another one, we know it’s important to you guys and we want to make sure it will be available to users living in Malaysia and visiting Malaysia,” she told reporters at its launch yesterday at the Aloft Hotel.

She said based on global Yelp numbers, the highest category of businesses reviewed is shopping at 23 per cent, followed by restaurants, at 19 per cent.

The Californian also pointed out that business owners do not have to pay to be listed on Yelp and “thousands” of businesses primarily based in KL are already featured on its platform, thanks to a database of business listings purchased from a local provider.

There will also be reviews already available thanks to a “handful” of users scouted by the company a month prior to today’s launch.

Businesses will also have the option to respond to users either privately or publicly.

When asked about its revenue model, Warren said Yelp has yet to monetise its operations in any of its nine countries in Asia including Malaysia and has no plans to do so for “foreseeable future”.

Eventually, Warren said Yelp will monetise its business via local advertisements, but only “at the right time”.

Malaysia is only the second Southeast Asian country where Yelp is currently present. The review site was launched in Singapore in 2012 and historically, Yelp, which was founded in 2004, enters two to five new international markets annually.

Warren also said Yelp has a recommendation engine that vets through and discards reviews that are not useful or have a “malicious component”, and recommends reviews that are “trustworthy” particularly from active users on Yelp.

“So this algorithm takes into account a whole bunch of different factors around who wrote the review and why the review is written and when and where and all of those sorts of things to be able to determine what the best reviews are and in this case the best reviews and the ones we believe are most helpful and they are written by typically whom we know enough about,” she said.

It remains to be seen how this algorithm will affect reviews written in Malaysia that will likely contain a mixture of English, Malay, Chinese, and, Tamil as well as local slang.

As for business owners, Yelp allows them to offer a discount or promotions to potential customers who check in using Yelp at the businesses on, for example, day with lower patronage.

Such marketing tools are available to business at no cost currently, Warren added.

The website and mobile app will also appear in the language that is set in one’s phone or computer and

the Malay language is the 17th language available on Yelp. Translations are done via Microsoft’s Bing translator.

It remains to be seen if Yelp will succeed in positioning itself as a competitor to sites such as TripAdvisor, Hungrygowhere.com or even local blogs that are currently the de facto choice for reviews among Malaysian Internet users.