Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, us insiders know that the difference between Hwy 101 and Hwy 280 is like the difference between the mall ring-road on the Saturday before Christmas and the Autobahn. Some of us will go through some awfully long detours just to get to our favorite freeways, but it’s not always easy to know the best way to get there. It can also mean that online maps aren’t as relevant because you might be coming at your destination from an unexpected direction.

Now following your favorite freeway on Yahoo! Maps is as easy as drag & drop. Once you get your directions to your destination, if you don’t quite like what you see, you can pick up your route and drop it somewhere else, and we’ll drive you through the area you select in the most efficient manner. If that’s still not quite right, you can tug on the route again until it’s perfect. Of course you can undo your through-points whenever you like, or go back to your original route. We’ll even tell you the difference in mileage and estimated time between your personalized route and our fastest route. This would be great for long trips where you want to see some interesting detours or scenic routes.

In addition to our personalized routes, we’ve made a few other changes. Searching for businesses on a map just got more informative. Inside the business popups on the map there are now photos and user review quotes, and we’ve also re-formatted the list view to make it easier to understand your results. Yahoo! Maps is now a bit faster, and we’ve fixed a couple of our favorite pet-peeves, like being able to save as many addresses as you’d like.

We hope you like the new functionality.

Happy drag & dropping,

Michael Lawless - Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.