Yelp encourages people to review federal agencies

Yelp wants you to share your opinion on everything: from restaurants, to salons, to healthcare facilities.

Now it wants you to review the government.

Under a new agreement with Yelp, federal agencies can now claim their existing Yelp pages or launch new ones to respond to reviews. Yelp said in a statement that it hopes this new feature will create a two-way conversation between people and the government.

"We encourage Yelpers to review any of the thousands of agency field offices, TSA checkpoints, national parks, Social Security Administration offices, landmarks and other places already listed on Yelp if you have good or bad feedback to share about your experiences," the company said in the Tuesday statement. "Not only is it helpful to others who are looking for information on these services, but you can actually make an impact by sharing your feedback directly with the source."

Yelp is a crowd-sourced reviews site that changed the game of word-of-mouth recommendations. It publishes reviews of local businesses, written by people who have had first hand experiences with the business. The company was founded in 2004, and has taken hold in major metro areas across 31 countries.

The company also announced earlier this month that it joined forces with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organization, to incorporate additional statistics onto the Yelp pages of thousands of medical treatment facilities pages.

This array of changes comes as the San-Francisco based company looks to redeem itself from its grim second-quarter earnings report that sent its stock into a nose dive earlier this month. The company reported a revenue loss of $1.3 million (two cents a share) compared to the $2.7 million (four cents a share) profit it registered for the same quarter a year ago.

Follow Paste BN reporter Trisha Thadani on Twitter: @TrishaThadan i