• by Shankar Gupta , November 1, 2005

Verizon will today start including user reviews of local merchants on its Yellow Pages Web site, SuperPages.com. The reviews, combined with a comparison shopping engine that was released last week, aim to make the buying decision-making process easier for local shoppers online.

"The user reviews are one additional way of providing our consumers with added features and added information that they can use in their shopping and making decisions about service providers, restaurants, different businesses, so they're getting feedback from the community," said Robyn Rose, SuperPages.com's director of product and channel marketing.

The user-reviews went live on BigBook.com--another Verizon-owned site--on Friday, to give the technology a test-run and to glean a few user reviews before launching on the higher-trafficked SuperPages.com.

The comparison shopping engine, which went live on Oct. 28, unifies three different searches into one, three-columned set of product search results--results on new products, eBay auctions of previously owned products, and product research data, including editorial reviews.

"This was a way of allowing users when they do a search for a product to get content from the multiple places on our site that we've got it," said Rose. "Instead of having to go different paths for the merchant information or the eBay auctions, now we've got it all on the site."