In addition, Yelp is committing $25 million to help small restaurants and bars that are struggling financially due to the public’s social distancing. The funding will come “primarily” in the form of free advertising, products and services, however, rather than pure cash. Yelp said it will give restaurants with delivery or takeout options $100 in free search advertising. The company has also promised “support for independent local advertisers in other categories that are struggling to pay their bills during this difficult time.”

Yelp is giving restaurants and nightlife businesses access to premium Yelp page features, too. These include Business Highlights, a section that allows owners to add labels such as “vegetarian-friendly,” “locally-owned & operated” and “X years in operation” with small but eye-catching iconography. Restaurant owners will also be granted Call to Action buttons, which can take customers directly to an order form, coupon, or external site, and Yelp Connect, an Instagram-style post format that appears on their business page and, for appropriate customers, the app’s home screen and a personalised weekly email.

Finally, restaurant owners will be allows to create a banner alert with a custom message on their page. They’ll also be given tools that clearly explain if they’re closed temporarily or have simply adjusted their hours.

For a three-month period, restaurant owners will also have access to Yelp Reservations and Waitlist, a pair of intertwined services that allow restaurant owners to take bookings online and on their personal site, as well as set up custom floor plans, track walk-ins and manage a waitlist.

Yelp isn’t the only company trying to help the restaurant business. Grubhub has temporarily suspended its commission fees for independent restaurants nationwide, and Uber Eats has waived delivery fees for over 100,000 business across the US and Canada. Many business, including Postmates and Instacart, have already added no-contact delivery options, too.

In the first part of the personalization setup, you’ll be prompted to choose some dietary, lifestyle and accessibility preferences. This isn’t the same as getting in deep and telling the app you love korean food or cocktail bars, though. It gives some high-level options to tell the app that you prefer gluten-free, kosher, vegetarian or vegan restaurants, for example. Yelp will then take these preferences into account across the service, highlighting restaurants that it knows have a good amount of vegan options, if that’s what you need.

“Lifestyle” lets you tell the app whether you’re a homeowner, auto owner, parent or pet owner — this would be used to highlight locations that are pet-friendly, if you want a restaurant that’ll let you bring your dog. Finally, accessibility encompasses places that are wheelchair-friendly as well as spots that offer gender-neutral restrooms.

After those preferences, Yelp asks you to select your favorites from a host of food and drink categories. The labeling is a little odd; you pick from “cuisine” (Chinese, American, Mexican, etc.), “food” (BBQ, burgers, pizza) and “snacks and drinks” (coffee, bakeries, donuts, ice cream). After filling out your food preferences, you do the same for a “things to do” section, which encompasses nightlife, activities (like arcades, beaches and hiking) and shopping and culture. Finally, the “lifestyle” section includes things like hair salons, spas, antiques, home decor and a few others.

It’s a lot of things to consider, and some of the sub-categories seem a little unnecessary. Yelp says these lists will keep being updated and tweaked over time, so we’ll see what the categories look like a year from now. The good news is that it’s a simple process to swipe down the grid of icons and tap the ones you’re interested in. Once that’s done, you’ll see those preferences reflected across your Yelp experience.

On the home screen, Yelp’s “nearby and open now” area highlighted Thai, Middle Eastern and Mexican restaurants, all categories I checked off when setting up my profile. Search results for restaurants also highlighted my preferences. For example, one of the top restaurants in the search results had a tag noting it was the most-visited Italian spot in the neighborhood, with Yelp’s new personalization heart reflecting that this was a category I’m interested in.

As spotted by Taylor Wimberley on Twitter and confirmed by several other users, the update adds a new tab to the Menu page on a restaurant’s Maps listing called Popular Dishes:

When did Google Maps get these crowd sourced menu pics? So valuable! pic.twitter.com/hOUOIIfbj9

— Taylor Wimberly (@wimbet) May 3, 2019

The new feature seems to scan reviews of the restaurant to find commonly-mentioned dish names, then adds photos included with those reviews to the Popular tab. Whether this is done automatically or humans are involved is currently unclear, but a fully automated system would presumably make mistakes whereby someone’s review mentioned one dish and the photo showed another. That said, Google does have extensive image-recognition tech (as seen in Google Photos, for instance) which could be used here.

9to5Google notes that while you can suggest edits to the information shown, as with anything on Maps, several dishes don’t have names because the person posting them didn’t include a caption. That’s not so helpful when customers spot something delicious and want to order it, but they could always show the photo to the waitstaff.

The update to Maps has only been rolled out to some phones at the time of writing, and is most likely in testing. If it works well, we’ll likely see it on the main Maps app before long, bringing Google Maps one step closer to its restaurant review rivals Yelp and TripAdvisor.