Yahoo To Partner With Yelp On Local Search Results

Yahoo is reportedly teaming up with Yelp to provide more in-depth local search results, with business listings and user-generated reviews and photos set to be incorporated into Yahoo’s search results.

The partnership revealed by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at a company meeting, and the features will be rolled out over the next few weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Yelp, which already has similar existing content partnerships with Microsoft and Apple, had an average of approximately 120 million monthly unique visitors in Q4 2013. It was founded in San Francisco in 2004, and currently features around 53 million total reviews on its site.

Search quality

The partnership is the latest in a series of moves by Mayer as she looks to continue a revival of the company’s fortunes. In its most recent results, Yahoo revealed that income from search adverts made up around one-third of the company’s total revenues, rising 8 percent to $461million in the fourth quarter of 2013.

During the company’s keynote speech at CES earlier this year, Mayer, who was previously in charge of the search engine team at Google, underlined Yahoo’s commitment to search by revealing it had signed deals with 869 partners during 2013.

According to recent data from comScore, Yahoo has 10.8 percent of the search market, less than Google’s 67.3 percent and Microsoft’s 18.2 percent. Yahoo signed up 869 search partners during 2013, but prices for its online display and search advertisements declined in the most recent quarter – although the overall number of advertisements sold by Yahoo actually increased by three percent compared to the previous year.

The Internet giant’s recent activity has suggested a shift in its focus as the company looks to take on larger rivals such as Google and Microsoft. The company’s first ever appearance at CES saw CEO Marissa Mayer demonstrate a variety of new products and services in a celebrity-filled keynote. “We have been hard at work re-imagining Yahoo’s core businesses across search, communications, media and video,” she said.

However, this progress did hit a recent bump when Mayer fired Yahoo’s COO, Henrique de Castro, just over a year after she poached him from her former employer Google, with disappointment over recent results and growing tensions between the two believed to be the reason for his departure.

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