Rumors about Google intending to buy Yelp broke out on the Web. It doesn't really come as a surprise, and it's even coming quite late in Google's game. Google is interested in consumer reviews because Google is now catering online services to small businesses.
It all started on September 24th, when Google announced Place Pages for businesses. Right off the bat, Yelp was identified as the potential loser in this adequation. This wasn't entirely true because Yelp had quality reviews from millions of dedicated users. Google didn't have that. However, Google announced that Place Pages were only designed to appear in Google Maps, which was not true: Those pages were indexed and findable on the Web.
