Yahoo Local Upgrades with City Pages, Maps, and RSS
Yahoo Local has introduced the ability to search by neighborhood and city pages to their popular local community search offering. New city and neighborhood (community) pages feature business, local events and restaurants which have received favorable reviews by Yahoo users. The new Yahoo Local add-on is even more incentive for businesses to direct their customers to their Yahoo Business Profile and incentive customers to give unbiased reviews.
Brian Gil of Yahoo Local posts on the Yahoo Search Blog : “Start with our city pages, which we’ve built for every city, neighborhood, and zip across the US of A. Our new city pages highlight upcoming events, top user recommendations for restaurants and other favorite local spots — all neatly plotted on a map of your city or neighborhood. On our search results pages, check out the “User recommended” refinement option to quickly see the best the area has to offer according to the community locals.”
Yahoo has also integrated local search results and featured businesses into their maps area of Yahoo local. Scroll over the map on the city page listings and Yahoo serves business info and user reviews in little interactive “pop-up” windows. Yahoo Local also features alternative maps such as Traffic and Wi-Fi Hotspot Maps.
For an example of the new Yahoo Local city pages, try the city page for Annapolis, MD, Yahoo Local not only serves interesting reviews on local restaurants and favorite businesses, but also for Local Happenings such as theatre and live music.
One of the features I really like is the Yahoo Local suggestions (located at the bottom of the Yahoo Local pages). Recently, I wrote a review for a pizza joint in Havre de Grace, MD and also read the review of another Yahoo user. When I visit the Annapolis, MD Yahoo Local page, based on my recent user behavior, Yahoo recommends different pizzerias in my neighborhood (entered in Yahoo as Havre de Grace).
Dear Yahoo Local, I would like to see suggestions of different businesses in the town I’m researching (Annapolis), not my home town or locations I have read about in the past. Example, if I tend to search for an review coffee joints in various towns and check out the Yahoo Local page for Brooklyn, NY – I would expect to automatically be served recommended places to buy coffee in Brooklyn, not the town I live in.
All in all, the additions to Yahoo Local are excellent upgrades for the most popular local search engine. I’d like to see what some users come up with in terms of aggregating Yahoo Local RSS feeds which have also recently been added. Excellent job Yahoo.
