Yahoo Releases New Version of Yahoo Local

Yahoo has announced some new features to their local search offering, Yahoo Local ( http://local.yahoo.com ) The new features include the ability to search by neighborhood and a recent search history and suggestions based on the search history.

I went and did various searches for places. While the "neighborhood" search worked fairly well, it should be noted that a neighborhood is still a very large area, at least for the results I looked at. Don't expect that everything you're going to find is going to be within walking distance.

I like the nav on the left. It shows you a choice of neighborhoods, a map (which is a tich small for my taste; you can mouseover it to get a larger version), matches by category, matches by rating, and matches by name. At the bottom of all this is your recent history; what you searched for and what you looked at. You can clear this or turn it off if it creeps you out.

You can send listings to a mobile phone as a text message (nice), add it to your address book, or send it to a friend. The listings were useful; I like the addition of major intersections (address listings would include notations like "Near intersection of N Croft Ave and Beverly Blvd") and the reviews for the most part were quite useful.

I was less enamored of the recommendation engine. From my searching for tires in Beverly Hills, Yahoo Local recommended a Box N' Ship in Pasadena -- aren't they about 20 miles apart? And another company in Pacoima -- and again, isn't that about 20 miles away from Beverly Hills? It would be nice if you could tweak the recommendations so they only manifested within an x mile radius of the last business you looked at.

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