Yelp comes to London

Yelp, the local review and search site, where people recommend or damn everything from restaurants, to doctors to builders, is launching in London.

The San Francisco site, which has become a verb since it began in 2004 (did you Yelp this place?), is hoping to continue its recent expansion with its first foray overseas. Yelp covers more than 18 metropolitan areas in the United States with more than 4.5 million opinions posted by an enthusiastic community of reviewers.

"London is the heart of the English-speaking world and one of the world's great cities, and we
have always intended have a UK presence." Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of
Yelp, told me.

"For the past three years Londoners have been asking us to bring Yelp to the UK and
we're excited to have finally taken this step. We are committed to making Yelp London as
vibrant and useful as Yelp in San Francisco or New York."

Jeremy said that in the last month more than 100,000 people from the UK visited Yelp.com to research travel destinations in America. Yelp claims to be the fastest growing and deepest source for information on the best neighborhood businesses in the US and Canada. It is also a social networking site with an offline community who meet up regularly.

One of the first thing people told me when I arrived in the Bay area was to go to Yelp to check out local restaurants and services.

This is a funny time to be expanding and Jeremy admitted that the advertising downturn was affecting the company which employs more than 200 people, mostly in sales. But he said that the company still had venture capital funding in the bank and wanted to expand strategically.

But even as the Yelp team are in London for the launch, the site is embroiled in a high profile defamation lawsuit against a San Francisco resident who posted on a negative review.

CNET news reports that Christopher Norberg, a 26-year-old custom furniture builder went to a chiropracter after a car accident but ended up in a dispute over the billing. He posted a negative review and the chiropracter is now suing him for defamation, saying the posting makes him look dishonest.

The case, which is being billed as a high profile free speech on the internet case, looks certain to go to court at the moment.

Yelp has some competition in the UK from the like of Yell and Timeout but its lively community of reviewers might just transplant easily to the London scene. The UK site has been seeded with several thousand reviews from freelance writers already. The company is seeking a community manager in London and wants to expand to other UK cities. I think it might just work.