Foursquare, which in 2009 and has 20 million users, lets users "check in" to shops and other locations to share their whereabouts with social contacts.

Foursquare the redesign as "a whole new app." The app's "explore" function will now allow users to browse locations by category or conduct a specific search like "free wi-fi" or "dumplings," a company announcing the launch said.

The company touts the "explore" function as a better local search than Google or Yelp. While users of those apps all get roughly the same results, Foursquare users get "a very personalized set of search results," based on prior check-ins, friends' check-ins and a given location's popularity across Foursquare, Holger Luedorf, Foursquare's vice president of business development, said at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Reinforcing the point, the blog post Thursday noted, "It's not the one-size-fits-all approach to local discovery you're used to."

Thursday's redesign debuted a Top Picks feature, or a set of recommendations that appear without requiring a query, a representative said. The existing feature that allows users to find friends who may be nearby has also been relocated to the "explore" tab.