Putting the user in the driving seat
You may have noticed that Yahoo! Local has undergone several front-end enhancements since its big makeover in August 2007. A couple of signficant changes took effect recently, namely, search refinement has been extended to allow users to drill down upon the exact businesses they seek. For instance, should you find yourself hankering for a family-friendly, California restaurant located within 10 miles of your home, you can make use of the Atmosphere, Distance, and Category locators to more readily identify the best options. To tighten results even more, filter by increasing the distance or narrowing to the highest rated restaurants.
In an effort to keep you better connected to new reviews from the people and places you prefer, Yahoo! Local now offers RSS feeds on key areas of the site so you can receive updates as they become available (Hint: look for the radiating RSS symbol 
).
From our city guide pages, you can choose to “Add RSS” for recent reviews and stay abreast of users’ varied experiences with local businesses. If you encounter a great review from a particular user, click on a picture or name in order to view that user’s profile page and add an RSS feed to get his or her future reviews. Finally, you can establish an RSS feed to get notified when Yahoo! Local users comment on your reviews. Just navigate to your MyLocal profile page, scroll to the “comments on your reviews” section, and click to “Add RSS.”
Finally, a first review on a business really does get the ball rolling in providing valuable insights to other Yahoo! Local users. In an effort to encourage users to contribute that essential first review, you may have noticed the First Reviewer attributions that now appear on business details pages. It’s your key to finding out who the local experts really are, and to get credit for submitting a review that helps others make decisions.
We hope you make good use of the latest updates and as always, let us know your thoughts here.
Shawn Bolan
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Local
December 12th, 2007 at 4:27 am
[…] en especial, en la interfaz del usuario que ha experimentado un par de cambios significativos. El primero de los cambios que ha entrado en vigor recientemente es el de la búsqueda, que se ha refinado y ampliado para que […]
December 13th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
[…] 13, 2007 Yahoo! Local has rolled out some new features to increase the Web 2.0-ness of its local search […]
December 30th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
I’d love to promote my reviews on my blog and/or in its feed. Unfortunately, there is no RSS feed on my profile page (http://local.yahoo.com/profile?tab=reviews) - yet!
It also stands to reason I may become enamored with other reviewers and want to subscribe to their feeds as well. I’m not all ego ;-).
December 31st, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Correction: I see now that users do get feed assigned to them (very nice!). But to see my own feed I had to log out and view my profile on Local. Would have been more intuitive to reveal my feed to me on my profile. After all, who’s going to promote me better than me
?
January 16th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Hi Joe - Good point…we weren’t sure that users would want an RSS feed of their own reviews, but certainly the link can be passed to others as you desire to do. You are right that you can log out in order to gain access to the RSS feed of your own reviews.
Also, the RSS feed we did provide access to on your profile page (while logged in) is for future comments received on your reviews - access to that RSS feed is available in the “Comments on Your Reviews” section of your MyLocal profile
Shawn Bolan
Local Product Management
January 16th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
[…] or reviews has improved dramatically - the revamped UI has been a boon, indeed. Check out the latest Local features and then tell us what you want to […]