It seems that Yahoo is looking to make a push in the French market – the popular search engine will not feature local business info in relevant results in France, pulled in from PagesJaunes. The French business directory already receives 100 million visits per year from a similar partnership with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
Originally reported in Challenges, the partnership comes at a point where Yahoo! is looking to revamp its image and positioning in the search engine and content space. While Yahoo! Is the #4 visited site in the US (surprisingly, and likely due to its more popular divisions, like Yahoo! mail and Yahoo! Finance) its is #9 in France, so perhaps its looking to gain a bit more search market share by providing more valuable search results.
In France, PagesJaunes has a pretty good presence – in 2012, it was the third most downloaded free apps on the iPhone App Store in France. In addition, its Google Maps competitors Mappy is the 2nd most downloaded on the iPad, sources say.
It will be interesting to see how this partnership between an international giant, Yahoo!, and a local giant, PagesJaunes, will affect Yahoo! search engine market share. While Google dominates search in France, just taking a few percentages points from Google’s market share and be equivalent to a few extra millions of euros in revenue.