As of yesterday you should have noticed a prominent new feature on Qype. A set of categories are now displayed at the top of each location page. It might not look like much, but it’s something that we’re very excited about. We think it’ll make browsing Qype much easier.

For example, if you want to eat out in London, now all that you have to do is go to the London page and click on Restaurants and a list of all the available types of restaurants in London will appear. There’s no need for typing or performing multiple searches, you can simply browse around the site.

Each category page has all of the available places listed in rank-order. So right now I can find the top-ranked Greek restaurant in the city within just a few clicks. Qype’s ranking method has also been updated, and there is an on-going effort to continue to refine it.

Of course, our tag-based search routine is still central to the site, and for now at least, with categories in their infancy, tagging can generate results that the category system cannot, but over the coming weeks you should continue to see incremental improvements as we iron out the kinks.