We heard last month that Yahoo and Yelp were teaming up to add local business reviews to Yahoo’s local search results. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reportedly revealed the partnership in an employee meeting. These things never stay inside the company.
Anyhow, both companies have now announced the partnership and integration. When Yahoo users in the U.S. look up local businesses, they’ll see user reviews, business information, and star ratings from Yelp as well as photos from Yelp, other partners, and the businesses themselves.
“At Yahoo, we’re always looking to build great partnerships to provide a richer experience for our users,” says Anand Chandrasekaran, Senior Director, Product Management at Yahoo. “That’s why we’re especially fired up to add trusted user content from Yelp, bringing more business listings, more photos, and more reviews to the recently-refreshed Local Search and Yahoo Maps experiences. With information and photos for retail chains, mom and pop shops, spas, doctors and hospitals, restaurants, and more, Yelp is a welcome addition to our roster of local content partners.”
“With local searches making up about 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic, the demand for reliable local information is high, and we’re excited to make this experience even richer for Yahoo users,” says Mike Ghaffary, Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at Yelp. “Across all categories of local business, from dog groomers and day spas to nightclubs and burger joints, trusted content from Yelp’s vibrant community of locals will help Yahoo users decide where to spend their money.”
Both companies consider Yelp reviews to be “trusted,” and perhaps they are by many, but it has become clear that there are also quite a few businesses and consumers that don’t exactly trust what they read on the site. This week, we reported on none other than Andrew Zimmern blasting the site and its reviews. We also hear from businesses all the time (see the comments sections of most of our Yelp articles) that they don’t care for Yelp, often saying it hurts them more than helps them. Yelp itself, also continues to deal with the never-ending problem of fake reviews.
Yelp currently has over 53 million reviews.
Image via Yelp