Have you ever wondered what the funniest Yelp review ever written was? Or the coolest? Unfortunately, the Yelp API currently has no way of finding this out. I decided I find out myself.
Python 2.7 is required. Install dependencies with:
pip install -r requirements.txt
There are two ways to go about finding the funniest yelp review. Scraping reviews from the restaurant-page or scraping reviews from the user-page. Thankfully, each user-page already allows users to sort reviews by their funny score, so I'll go with approach two.
The first step in this approach is to gather a large list of users (Ideally, every user on yelp that has written a review, but for the purposes of this experiment, I'll limit myself to all users in the Bay Area). This can be done by a simple BFS web crawl of any yelp-user page and the pages of his or her friend. When we visit a page, we also make sure to grab all the reviews the user has written that have one or more cool, useful, or funny votes.
python get_yelp_reviews <random user's yelp page> out.csv
The above command will spit out a csv file of the metatdat for each review.