With a new feature called Yelp Connect, Yelp is allowing users to go beyond customer reviews and see “what the restaurants have to say for themselves.”

That’s according to Devon Wright, Yelp’s general manager of restaurant marketplaces. He explained that with Yelp Connect, restaurants will be able to post updates about things like recent additions to the menu, happy hour specials and upcoming events. These updates are then shown on the Yelp homepage (which is already becoming more personalized), in a weekly email and on the restaurant’s profile page.

Consumers, meanwhile, can follow restaurants to see these updates, but Yelp also shows them to users who have indicated interest in a restaurant by making a reservation, joining its waitlist or bookmarking its profile.

Of course, restaurants are already posting this kind of information on social media, but Wright said Yelp allows them to reach “a high-intent audience” — people who aren’t just browsing for updates from their friends, but are actually looking to go out for a meal.

Guang Yang, the group product manager for Yelp Reservations and Waitlist, also noted that restaurants can set end dates for their Yelp posts, which could make them more comfortable sharing things like limited-time menus.

Yelp Connect will cost $199 per month for U.S. restaurants, but is available for a limited time at a price of $99 per month.

Wright described this is part of a broader evolution at Yelp, where “you don’t just want to discover a great restaurant, you want to transact [with] that restaurant.” So the company has added things like reservations, with Connect serving as “the final piece of that journey,” allowing restaurants to continue reaching out to consumers after their visit.

In addition to launching Connect, Yelp is also announcing an upgrade to its Waitlist feature, which allows consumers to see the current estimated wait time at a restaurant, and to join the queue directly from the Yelp app.

Yang said Yelp can now use real wait time data from a restaurant to predict the average wait at a given time — so if you want to get dinner tonight at 7pm, Yelp can tell how long you’ll probably have to wait. (These estimates are based on a party size of two; you’ll enter your real party size and get an updated estimate when you actually join the waitlist.)

Yelp is also using these predictions to power an additional feature called Notify Me. If you want to get seated at a certain restaurant at a certain time, you can hit a button to get a notification that will prompt you to join the waitlist at the right time — if you want to eat at 7pm, and the average wait time at 7pm is an hour, then you’ll get a notification at 6pm.

Yang said the algorithm is “pretty sophisticated,” and even incorporates some of the common situations that can confound these estimates, like kitchen closing times, or popular restaurants that have long a waitlist as soon as they open.

Still, he acknowledged that there will be times when the actual is different from what’s predicted, which may be challenging when you’ve told all your friends to meet you somewhere at a given time. But in those cases, he said most restaurants “acknowledge and understand, ‘Oh, something happened, wait time changed,’ ” and they’ll make accommodations if you show up later.

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Yelp announced this morning that it will start allowing users to tailor their search results and homepage based on their personal preferences.

In other words, if you’re a vegetarian, or if you’re a parent who’s usually looking for kid-friendly restaurants, you won’t have to reenter that information every time you do a search. Instead, you can enter it once and Yelp will prioritize those results moving forward.

“In the history of Yelp, this is the first time two people searching for the same thing from the same context are going to see different, personalized results,” said head of Consumer Product, Akhil Ramesh.

To do this, users select the “Personalize your experience” option, then choose options around dietary restrictions (whether they’re vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and so on), their lifestyle (whether they’re parents, car owners or pet owners), their accessibility needs (wheelchair access, gender-neutral bathrooms), the types of food they prefer and other interests (like bookstores or date nights).

Once you’ve made your selections, those preferences will start affecting the search results you see. The personalization should be obvious because the results will be identified as having “many vegetarian options” or “because you like Chinese food.” The homepage will also start highlighting locations that it thinks you would like.

In some ways, this feels like a long overdue move, particularly when so many other popular apps and websites are already heavily personalized. Shy is Yelp finally adopting this approach now?

For one thing, Ramesh pointed to a growing interest in different diets. For another, he said, “We have years and years of unstructured, expressive, quality content, and this content is representative of a real experience with a business. Over the last few years our machine learning and AI capabilities have grown immensely, and what that’s allowed us to do is build really useful features on top of the high quality content that we have.”

Ramesh emphasized that Yelp will focus on using your explicitly shared preferences to shape your results, as opposed to feeding all your behavior into an algorithm. After all, he said, “any machine learning algorithm is going to have tons of biases.”

He described this approach as “the human way”: If you were having a conversation with a person, “You wouldn’t try to assume what the person did over the weekend. You would just ask the person and have an open conversation.”

At the same time, he said there are times when using your general behavior in the app to influence the results could be helpful, so Ramesh said, “We’re trying to figure out how to balance those aspects.”

He also noted that your preferences could change depending on timing and context: You might abandon a certain diet, or you might go out for a meal without your kids. So you can adjust your preferences at any time — or conversely, dive more deeply into one of them by selecting a list from the homepage.

Asked how this affects Yelp’s ad business, Ramesh said it won’t influence the ads you see initially, but the ads will come with similar “Because you liked X” messages tied to your preferences..

“I wouldn’t be surprised if which advertiser we show will be you based on your preferences [eventually], but there’s no ETA on that,” he added.

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