Facebook Is Building And Testing An Alternative To Yelp

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We’ve been expecting Facebook to enter Yelp’s territory for a while now, and it seems now is the time. Facebook is building, and now testing, a new feature that allows users to search, and get recommendations and ratings for nearby businesses – Professional Services.

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Users can use Professional Services to search for a business that interest them nearby.

Just enter your city and interest, and you will be presented with a list of the most relevant nearby businesses. Results are filtered as businesses rated higher are at the top. But that’s not all. Surely Facebook would also factor in things like the user’s interaction with similar pages in the past. The data that is displayed, comes from business pages in the vicinity which should make it very relevant to the person who searched.

Can Facebook’s Professional Services beat Yelp?

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You are then showed the information and contact details of each relevant business. The results page also includes a map to visually place each business and its location.

This development comes as an extension to the improvements rolled out by Facebook earlier this year. More specifically, the social network improved the way its search results are being displayed, in order to help users find pretty much everything they’re looking for. The new search results pages appear in a more structured way, displaying info from various sources.

So, what do you think? Is Facebook going to destroy Yelp with this? As more and more users turn to Facebook to find useful information, is Google the next target?

Image credit: Search Engine Land