14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced a new enhancement brought to its search engine Bing, through a partnership with Yelp.
Following this move, users in the United States will be provided with Yelp info on search results pages, which should provide them with the possibility to find what interests them easier than before.
As part of this agreement, Bing will feature integrated review snippets, photos, business attributes and more from Yelp, all offered on the search engine’s new local business pages.
“As one of the web’s leading local listing services, Yelp is a great resource that helps connect you with local businesses and restaurants,” Gurpreet S. Pall, partner engineering manager, Bing, explains.
“Scanning reviews from real people can often make the difference between the perfect night out and wishing you had stayed in. At Bing, we’re dedicated to helping you do more, so we are pleased to roll out increased Yelp coverage in Bing search results.”
The Yelp info has started to be visible in Bing’s search results pages on Thursday, and should become available for all users in the US in a matter of weeks.
These snippets of info will be showed in Bing’s snapshot (the center column), as well as on relevant Bing Local pages, so that users can easily access rich content related to what they are looking for.
“We're excited to be integrated in such a prominent way and hope that through this relationship we’re able to help direct even more consumers to great local businesses,” Yelp notes in a blog post.
The main idea behind this partnership was to provide Bing users with the possibility to access fresher and more reliable reviews of places around them, so that they could do more in their local area.
During the past few weeks, Microsoft has been in an upgrade spree for Bing, through both changing the layout of search engine’s results page, and adding results from various other content providers, including Encyclopedia Britannica and Qwiki.