Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog

We have seen countless users struggle to find what they’re looking for in a specific area or neighborhood using current local search and online maps products (ahem…ours included). The results may be spread over too wide an area or not in a specific enough area.

While we have had refinement options to help users narrow by distance or neighborhood for a long time in Yahoo! Local, this required the user to make the refinement selections and run their search again. This is certainly useful in many cases, but it is a cumbersome way to explore and compare results in different areas.

What users really wanted was a way to visually explore the results on the map more directly. And now they can with the release of a unique and innovative search circle in Yahoo! Local.

To see the search circle in action, let’s suppose you’re looking for Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. You type in the query and get a set of results:

Not bad, but these restaurants are scattered across the city and you really want to see what’s closer to Golden Gate Park. So you click on the ‘Expand Map’ link to get a more detailed map view:

This is where the search circle really changes things. Now you immediately see how wide the search area is but can easily narrow this down…

…and just as easily drag the circle closer to Golden Gate Park…

…or perhaps you’re wondering if there’s a Chinese restaurant within roughly a one mile radius of the beach? No problem, just shrink the circle down a bit (it dynamically calculates the radius in miles) and drag the search circle again – it will even automatically pan the map if you hit the map edge…

What would once have been a much more difficult task has now become incredibly easy. So go ahead, try it out and figure out just how many Chinese restaurants, banks or nail salons are within a one mile radius of your house. We think you’ll like it, but as always, please let us know either way. We’re always looking for feedback (the good and the bad) from our users.

Tom Wailes, Yahoo! Local UED

The Yahoo! Maps team is happy to announce the single biggest imagery update on maps.yahoo.com since the program inception.  While we’ve steadily added new cities around the world every month (over 500 now) since the beginning, we haven’t made as much of a change in the US until today.  Our latest release improves both breadth and depth.

Going wide, we’ve made big improvements in our wall-to-wall coverage of the United States, improving our back-drop data for a number of complete states, including California, Oregon, New York, the Carolina’s, and numerous other states in the west and midwest.  State-wide, you’ll see an improvement in freshness, color and clarity.  Here’s an example up at McCloud, CA, which is a beautiful part of California near Mt. Shasta.

Going deep, and I think more importantly, we’ve enabled up to 2 extra zoom levels of aerial photography and satellite imagery for the Satellite button for hundreds of cities around the US.  Not only can you see more detail, but in many places the imagery has gotten a welcomed refresh as well.  To see what I mean, check this out new view of Denver City Hall.

I’ve always believed that satellite and aerial imagery adds an important context to understanding our maps and driving directions, and with this update, I hope you’ll agree with me that this feature is even more useful.

Cheers,

Michael Lawless, Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps