This Year’s “Most Romantic Yelp City in the World” is…

Well, it looks like Cupid has flown the coop and descended on a new city of love. How do we know? Our team of love-struck engineers took a look at our search data from 2011 and found a list of search queries that suddenly “pop” in February. These include terms you may expect like “french food,” “ocean views,” “lingerie,” “dinner & movie,” “chocolate covered strawberries,” but also some surprises like “cheap flowers” and, er, “sex shops.” (Hey, to each his own!)

Then what? We look at which cities search for these romantic terms the most the week before and during Valentine’s Day. To make sure the numbers are accurately reflected we did two things:

• Each city must have a total of at least 100 searches to qualify;
• Like last year, we used the Wilson Score of Proportion to calculate. Why don’t we just count up the number of romantic searches by city and order by that count? Well, that wouldn’t be very fair as our biggest Yelp communities like San Francisco and New York have a much larger number of absolute searches. The Wilson Score gives us a much clearer and fairer picture of just which cities have set their hearts on matters of the, well, heart!