Let your wallet do the walking
Both Tech Crunch and the New York Times have cited multiple people in the know as sources that Google is in the process of trying to buy Yelp - a website that lists local businesses and allows users to write reviews on them.
There doesn't appear to be any confirmation, or otherwise, from either company, but if there is some truth to the reports, it would mark the latest in a series of recent acquisitions by Google, which seems to be going through a period of corporate hyperactivity of late.
The price Google will have to pay for Yelp, which has UK versions of its site, is reported to be at least $500 million. The acquisition creates the potential for Google to be the Yellow Pages of the digital age, with local searches on Google potentially yielding a lot more information than just a website or two.
Adam Bunn, head of SEO at UK search marketing agency Greenlight, reckons such a deal will have been by the desire to take on Microsoft's Bing search engine at its own game. Here's part of his statement:
These kind of deals give search engines direct access to structured data allowing them to reliably and accurately incorporate that data into their search results without the need to go through the usual crawling and indexing process, and increasingly offer functionality directly to users rather than simply sending them to another site.
This is one of the strategies that Microsoft had chosen for Bing, and the main reason why it took so long for Bing to launch properly in the UK; identifying potential content or functionality partners relevant to that market, negotiating with them and then integrating their data takes time.
But it's worth it; Bing for example offers some compelling functionality integrated directly into its results, like restaurant booking courtesy of TopTable. And once up and running the costs for the search engine are marginal compared to the cost of crawling
A potential acquisition of Yelp by Google could be seen as a reaction to Microsoft's strategy. And let's not forget the huge potential for Google to sell targeted ads across a local network that it controls directly.
