Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Yahoo Local and neighborhood pages

Brian Gil has the post on the Yahoo Search blog about the latest enhancements to Yahoo Local.

The city and neighborhood pages are pretty cool. Here's the pages for Seattle and for Capitol Hill in Seattle. The pages list some upcoming events, recommended restaurants, and other goodies.

For the moment, the reviews seem a little sparse, hurting the quality of the pages and limiting their credibility, but I'm sure that'll change with time.

Getting high quality, authoritative, reputable reviews is the key for local search. The Yellow Pages lacks any easy way to differentiate between the businesses listed. Whoever can provide trustworthy, useful, and comprehensive information and recommendations on top of business listings will win local search.

See also good and detailed writeups from Danny Sullivan and John Battelle.

Update: Yahoo also seems to be doing clickstream history and recommendations now in Yahoo Local. Look at a couple restaurants or other business listings, then look at the bottom of the city page. There's a section for Recently Viewed, Recent Searches, and "Based on your recent activity, you might like". The Yahoo recommendations seemed poor in the 3-4 Seattle restaurant examples I tried, but I'd hope that improves as they get more data.

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