The search engine and portal company has unveiled the next generation of Yahoo Local, and claim to have every place covered.
A new update to the Yahoo search blog by Brian Gil announces another step in the growth of Yahoo’s local search feature. The site will draw from local user recommendations about their neighborhoods.
On first arriving at Yahoo Local and entering a city, the site returns a page with a map and a few icons display. Those icons mark the top three results for the city in terms of events, restaurants, and other local favorites. The local weather forecast appears on the right side of the page.
Users can add RSS feeds for local events, top restaurants, and local favorites to their newsreaders or to My Yahoo. Yahoo Local has a Recent History feature turned on by default at the bottom left of the page, and it can be turned off with a mouse click.
The classic Yahoo directory list returns on Yahoo Local. Categories in the directory, like movie theaters or golf, link to pages of results for the particular city. When refining search results, a small map appears on the page, and passing the mouse over it enlarges the map on the screen.
Sponsor ads appear above and below search results, and it was a bit humorous to see the first sponsored link on the user recommended results page be one for Google Local.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
