At a meeting Friday, the 7th of February, Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer announced an alliance between her mega search engine site and Yelp. Yelp’s reviews will be incorporated into the search engine.
You can expect to see this partnership unfold in the next several weeks. In a constant struggle to turn around fortunes of the world’s former #1 search engine web site, Mrs. Meyer hopes this integration can help compete with Google, the current search engine king, and Bing, the rising prince. Yelp already has partnerships with Microsoft and Apple. Keep in mind search engines make up for about a third of Yahoo’s annual revenue.
Yahoo’s search engine revenue has increased eight percent in the last quarter. I’m wondering if Yelp will keep the up trend going. Reviews are a huge part of any search engine, and a huge part of most businesses today. How often do you look at reviews before you check into a hotel, or eat at a restaurant, or even call for a taxi? I find myself checking reviews often. So why not combine a popular review site with a popular search engine site to gain the edge? It makes perfect sense to me. Do you think a Yahoo and Yelp partnership will work?