• Small Business SEM, Friday, February 29, 2008 1:15 PM

In the midst of SMX West excitement and Yahoo's announcement that it was opening parts of its search platform to developers, Matt McGee noticed that the Web giant gave local search and review service Yelp major exposure on its official blog post about Open Search.

"People/webmasters everywhere read the Yahoo search blog, right? And that listing looks nice--it shows off the great content Yelp offers about this one local business," McGee says. "So, how'd they land that gig as the poster child of Yahoo's new Open Search platform?"

McGee did some digging and found that the connection between Yahoo and Yelp is quite significant, as at the bottom of every business listing page on Yelp, users find a link to Yahoo Local search for the same category. So when a user goes to write a review for a bad Italian restaurant in their neighborhood, she can find other Italian restaurants via Yahoo Local with just one click.

McGee says that the relationship makes perfect sense, given Yahoo's understanding of how valuable online communities are--and could have a major impact on the local search landscape in the future.

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