Yahoo announced yesterday that it will partner with Yelp to list the information of its businesses (along with their reviews) in Yahoo search results.
Here’s how Yahoo’s senior director of product management explained the partnership in a blog post:
Now when you use Yahoo Search to look up a local business in the U.S. on your smartphone, tablet, or PC, you’ll see user reviews, business information, and star ratings from Yelp. We’ve also added a new photo viewing experience to show high-quality photos from Yelp, other partners, and the businesses themselves.
The deal is mutually beneficial to both Yahoo and Yelp in their shared goal of sticking it to Google. The search engine giant has been trying to promote its own Google Business listings, which also offer address information, pictures and reviews. However, they aren’t as detailed or comprehensive as the listings on Yelp, which, Yahoo hopes will give it a slight advantage when it comes to competing with Google for search.
The move also shows that Yahoo isn’t giving up on its core product, which is search. It may have made some moves in terms of stocking up its content publishing capabilities, but search (and more importantly advertising) is still where much of its focus remains.
For businesses, this now means they have to rely on customer reviews from both Yelp and Google to be able to get a decent showing in the search results on either site. Right now, the majority of people use Google to find the address of the business, but they go to Yelp to check out reviews and pictures, simply because Google doesn’t have enough of that user generated information.
Here’s what the integration of Yelp listings will look like in Yahoo search results:
For mobile:
And Desktop:
