Google Partners with Bazaarvoice, Brings Consumer Ratings to Product Search and Ads

Under a new partnership between Google and Bazaarvoice, retailers and manufacturers can display their online product reviews and ratings within their AdWords ad campaigns - as well as have them appear in product searches on Google.

Bazaarvoice is the first partner to join a new product reviews program from Google that will index product reviews and solicit full-text feeds from aggregators. The feeds will work in a way similar to Google's relationship with Twitter, which allows the search company to index tweets more quickly for delivery in search results. Product sellers can leverage the companies' integration to insert ratings into their Google advertising. Ads will display the number of users to review a product, as well as the average star-rating they gave under a five-star system. At launch, the ads do not contain any written reviews.