In its never-ending effort to best Google in the search advertising business, Microsoft has partnered with Yelp to integrate its reviews into Bing search results.
The move by Microsoft, announced on a Bing Community blog post June 14, follows a similar move by Google to incorporate Zagat reviews into its Google+ Local Pages search function, which was announced May 30.
Yelp, which was founded in 2004, provides a searchable social networking site to find bars, restaurants, spas, hotels, automotive repair and other businesses. Users rate businesses on a scale of one to five stars, with five being the highest rating, and they can write their own reviews. Yelp had 71 million monthly unique visitors in the first quarter of 2012. It makes money selling ads adjacent to its reviews. Yelp went public on March 2.
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