Yesterday Yahoo! announced an upgrade to the local Shortcut that enables greater discovery and interaction around local listings content in Yahoo! search results. Here’s an example search for a San Francisco restaurant, Salt House:
Each of the links at the bottom of the listing opens a window that provides more information: reviews, images, directions:
A couple of emails that I saw yesterday asked why are they bothering after the Micro-Hoo announcement? But this is precisely the kind of thing that Yahoo! is talking about when discussing innovation around the UI and user experience. Hopefully the Microsoft deal will free and embolden Yahoo! to experiment more and create more useful experiences/tools such as this.
There’s a question that remains in my mind about how much effort Yahoo! will put into Local (as in Yahoo! Local) going forward. It was the leading local property for quite some time until Yahoo! started losing people and the site was put on maintenance mode. An analogy might be: a great house that has has been neglected and needs some TLC.
As an aside, somewhat buried in the post, Yahoo! says “About 20 percent of online searches have a local intent.” I would again argue with this figure as too low but it’s significant because comScore’s number has been 12%-13% of search is local.
Screenwerk 
July 31, 2009 at 4:35 pm
A nice feature, but not especially innovative. Google’s been doing this for a long time. Eg: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a&q=carol+lewis+home+staging+bellevue+wa&ie=UTF8&ll=47.606163,-122.106171&spn=0.123145,0.308647&z=12&iwloc=A&iwd=1&cid=7085363916988229426
July 31, 2009 at 6:14 pm
[…] interesting mix of posts on search, local media sites and other online trends. I especially enjoyed this recent post on Yahoo’s upgrade to the local shortcut that appears in Yahoo’s search […]
July 31, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Malcom:
It’s the expanding menus/windows in general search results. Agree that Google has all the info in Maps and shows it on results but not in quite the same way
August 1, 2009 at 12:18 am
20% of local search has local intent? The “working number” was 30% several years ago – what gives? Sounds like another blurry definition of “local” here (implicit/explicit/IYP, etc)…
August 1, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Re the % figures, comScore has always been conservative. The “real” numbers are larger of course. I don’t know what the full basis of Yahoo’s assertion but it point it out because it’s larger.
In 2007 Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider said: Out of the 130 million monthly unique users of Yahoo last year, “116 million of them came to Yahoo with local intent.”
That’s a different stat but much larger. Google also recently cited w/o attribution a stat: “82% of people are doing local searches on Google.”