If you have dismissed Judy’s Book as a viable source of reviews for local businesses, you might want to rethink that position.  Bing has given Judy’s Book a prominent position in their local knowledge panels in the Bing search results.

When you do a local business search – both for restaurants and regular stores, Bing has added a new section for Judy’s Book, showing the number of reviews. they have for the business.  It appears beneath the expanded Yelp reviews and the FourSquare mention.

Here is how it looks:

You can see that Bing now lists “3 providers” above the Yelp results to show that they have more than just one source for local reviews.  It also shows FourSquare, which Bing added previously.

And a couple more examples:

However, when you look at it closer, the inclusion of Judy’s Book is odd.  For example, in the Applebees example, the most recent review listed was from almost ten years ago in 2006.  The most recent from the Bed Bath & Beyond example is 2007.  Even going to their “top ten” lists show reviews that are years old.  And reviews that are ten years old are highly unlikely to be useful to a customer today.

The Zomato addition seems to just be for reference information in the listings only.

How much weight should local marketers put on Judy’s Book?  It is hard to say.  The reviews are definitely outdated, but perhaps it is added because it is making a comeback – it seems odd that Bing would be adding it otherwise.  But perhaps they just want to show diversity and there are not that many large scale local review providers.