Just when dentists thought they had enough of online reviews, now Yelp and Bing are forging an new online search alliance.
This week Microsoft announced that search engine Bing will be featuring content from online review company Yelp, including dental reviews, in its search results.
According to Yelp, Bing search users should begin seeing the Yelp results in search within the next two weeks.
The announcement comes on the heels of a recent comScore report that Google led the U.S. search market in May 2012 with 66.7% of the search market share, followed by Bing with 15.4% and Yahoo! with 13.4%. Ask.com accounted for 3%, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5%.
17.5 billion searches were conducted, with Google search sites ranking first with 11.7 billion. Bing search sites ranked second with 2.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! search sites with 2.3 billion, Ask.com with 521 million and AOL, Inc. with 268 million.
Bing increased its share of the search market from May of last year and the new partnership with Yelp is an obvious attempt to continue this upward trend.
In the recent blog post, Bing and Yelp Help You Do More with Local Search, Bing writes, “As one of the web’s leading local listing services, Yelp is a great resource that helps connect you with local businesses and restaurants. 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.“
Microsoft keeps pushing support of Bing against Google by reporting that U.S. searchers on Bing are likely to spend 9% more than U.S. users searching with Google.
As search continues to be influenced by social activity on sites like Yelp, Google Plus, YouTube, and Facebook it will be interesting to see if Bing can compete on a larger scale with Google over time.
How do you feel about Yelp reviews showing up when dental patients search for local dentists on Bing?
For more on this see: comScore Releases May 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings
