Yelp Is Feeding Its Online Reviews of Restaurants And Other Local Merchants to Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine

Posted by Joachim Bartels | Jun 17, 2012 | Directories, E-Commerce, Search & Aggregation, United States, Yelp Inc. | 0 |

People using Bing to search for information about neighborhood businesses will be able to see excerpts from Yelp reviews.

The deal between Microsoft Corp. and Yelp Inc. comes two weeks after Google unveiled a new feature that serves up restaurant ratings from Zagat. Google Inc. bought Zagat’s popular rating service for $151 million last year. To attract more people, Google scrapped the online fees that Zagat charged to read its ratings.

Google’s decision to highlight Zagat in its influential search results threatens to divert traffic from Yelp. Joining forces with Bing makes sense for Yelp because both online services are locked in battle against Google to attract more advertising from local merchants.

Source: SFGATE.com

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Joachim Bartels

Joachim C Bartels is a co-founder, director, head of information resources and Editor-in-Chief of BIIA. In his capacity as Editor-in-Chief he is responsible for the selection of relevant information content concerning industry insights, trends, technological developments, standards and policies impacting BIIA members in particular and the business information industry in general.

The BIIA library is approaching 10,000 news items and best demonstrated practices. BIIA members receive regular news alerts on key developments in the industry and the regulatory environment. The BIIA readership is widespread: between 4 to 5 thousand unique visitors access BIIA.com per month.