Yahoo, Yelp Partnership will Improve Search Results

Yahoo, Inc. and online review site Yelp, Inc. are collaborating to improve search result and attract more users.

During an employee meeting on Friday, Yahoo chief executive officer Marissa Mayer announced that the company will be including Yelp’s listings of local businesses and their reviews into results on yahoo’s search engine. The results of such collaboration will be visible in the next few weeks, according to sources of the Wall Street Journal.

However, the terms of agreement of the partnership between the two companies weren’t disclosed as a spokesperson of Yahoo declined to comment about it.

The deal is in a way similar to the collaboration between Microsoft and Foursquare, which was reported a few days back by Bloomberg.

From day one since Mayer took charge of the Internet company, she has entered into different agreements with companies and other services. One of those is the company’s disappointing concord with Microsoft, which was closed in 2010.

Under the deal, Yahoo has agreed to give 12 percent of the total revenue the company earns from search advertisements displayed next to search results – that is equivalent to millions of dollars. Profit coming from search advertisements makes up more than a third of the company’s total revenue.

In the fourth quarter of 2013, after taking away Microsoft’s allotment, Yahoo’s revenue increased by eight percent to $461 million. Unfortunately, Yahoo cannot cut loose from the agreement until 2015, the midpoint of the decade-long concord, wherein both companies are allowed to opt out.

It was also last year when Mayer appointed Yahoo expert Laurie Mann to head a team of hundreds of employees to work on a search technology at the company.

Mayer, who previously headed search at Google, was also one of the key persons who tried to acquire Yelp for more or less than $500 million.