Thanks to a new deal, Bing's results for local businesses should soon get much better.  A report's indicated that Localeze, which specializes in local search, is going to provide something like 14 million business listings for Bing Local and Bing 411 to use.

Leena Rao wrote earlier today, "As part of the deal, Bing will use Localeze's premium business content, including more than 500,000 business-verified and managed listings, which have been edited directly by local businesses.  In addition to name/address and contact info, Localeze's listings also include hours of operation, products and services offered, credit cards accepted and more."

That's pretty useful information.  Indeed, it's the sort of stuff that not all search engines provide (business's profiles can be incomplete even when they happen to exist), so this development could give Bing a leg up on Yahoo and maybe Google.

Speaking of Google, though, there is one awkward thing about Localeze's relationship with Bing: as the picture to the right shows, it seems that Localeze picked Mountain View's search giant to power the search function on its own site.

Microsoft and Localeze might want to do something about that sort of mixed signal.

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