Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog

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

Recently, Harris Interactive conducted a survey for us that studied the “psyche” of the online reviewer.  We wanted to determine what motivates people to contribute to online review sites like Yahoo! Local and we found that the majority of online adults feel compelled to offer their opinion in order to help others in their community through knowledge-sharing, followed by a desire to promote the business and help the merchant succeed.

Based on these motivators, it’s no surprise that three in four online adults (77 percent) agree that sites with online reviews of local businesses are valuable community tools, and one in three adults (33 percent) feel more connected to their community by contributing to online review Web sites.

Needless to say, we’re glad that we’re providing a service that helps connect others and offers invaluable advice when making offline purchasing decisions.  Four out of five online adults (80 percent) are likely to be influenced by a review, and seventy-one percent of respondents at least somewhat, if not strongly, find online reviews helpful in making purchasing decisions.  In addition, one in four adults (29 percent) say their purchasing decisions are either always or often influenced by online review content!  That’s a sizeable percentage of the population.  You can feel good knowing that the reviews you write on Yahoo! Local are helping others in your community make decisions about which product or service they plan to purchase.

We’re also happy to report that more users are influenced by positive reviews than negative reviews (27 percent versus 12 percent, respectively).  These numbers are inline with ones that resulted from a similar study last year and they show that while online reviews are helpful for users, they are also helpful for local merchants.

It’s great to work on such a positive community tool for both local businesses and consumers alike, and these survey results only strengthen our belief in the services we provide through Yahoo! Local.  We hope you’ll continue to find the site a helpful resource and we always welcome your opinions to make the service even better!

Frazier Miller - GM Yahoo! Local

Real estate is the ultimate local business. That’s why our friends at Yahoo! Real Estate are always focused on making their products as local as possible. Recently, their launch of a home loan rate finder that can search for the best local rates caught our eye. With all the buzz around mortgages and real estate, house hunters and home owners alike are looking for tools to help them better navigate the market. So whether you’re buying a new home, refinancing, or pulling out equity, this is a great new tool to find the most competitive offers right in your area.

This comes on the heels of a completely upgraded home loans research section, where home owners and prospective buyers hungry for information can leverage tons of mortgage calculators (i.e. ever wonder how much that million dollar home would cost you per month?), see the latest rate trends and learn the ABCs of getting a loan. In addition, users can connect with a local mortgage broker through a new module leveraging our Yahoo! Local search API.

We hope you find these tools useful. Happy house hunting.

Michael Lawless
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps

Remember the old adage “you reap what you sow?” Well, it’s nowhere more true than in the neighborhoods in which we live. If you’re like me, perhaps you’re tired of seeing your favorite small businesses close due to competitive pressure from a chain store. Who knows, maybe you could’ve helped save that fave if you gave that merchant some kudos and told your neighbors about your great experience.

Well, now Yahoo! Local will help you do just that. We’ve completely overhauled the site to make it easier to contribute your opinion and through a new, updated algorithm, we’re making sure that search results take your ratings and reviews into account. We want to make sure that people’s contributions to Yahoo! Local count in more ways than one.

An example of this in action is the “pizza” in Chicago, IL results which better reflect what the community says is the best pizza in Chicago (obviously a hotly contested debate, we’re not sure we want to get involved in…):

In addition to the improved accuracy of our search results, some of the other new features we’re rolling-out today focus on more ways for you to find what’s best and closest to you:

• Commenting on User Reviews – No longer will it feel like shouting into the wind when you write a review. Now the people who benefit from your tips can reply back. You’ll also be able to track comments on your reviews from your My Local page.
• Weekender – Offers a weekly selection of events, movies (including show times and reviews), dining picks, and more to help you plan your weekend.
• More “Local Buzz” – Shows the top-moving search terms in your hometown with a new search cloud and exposes the most recent reviews of businesses in your area to see what people are buzzing about.
• Best Local Events – Taps into the Upcoming social events database to surface the best events in your hometown.
• Most Popular – Highlights the best of a city in the key categories of Restaurants, Health & Beauty, and Home & Garden.
• My Local Improvements – A new “save for later” feature so you can quickly archive those hidden gems you uncover along with your recent reviews, tags, and collections.

So, make sure to update your profile with a picture or avatar, look up some local favorites, write a few reviews, and comment back on some helpful reviews you discovered along the way.

Got a great idea for what you’d like to see next? Tell us about it on our new suggestion board.

Thanks!

- Brian Gil, Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Local

As proclaimed yesterday by c|net, “The Webware 100 awards recognize the best Web 2.0 apps.” So, it’s my pleasure to share with you that Yahoo! Maps has been named a winner in the Reference category for 2007.

We’ve made a number of improvements in the last few months, including an improved mapping platform, better design, mobile offerings, and new international streets and satellite imagery. While we’re always excited about the direction our product is headed in, we still count on your feedback to make the product more useful and easier to use. We will continue to improve the technology, interface, and features that matter to you most, particularly focusing on being the most accurate mapping service available.

More details on our award win and the other 99 top Web 2.0 apps can be found here.

We hope you’ll continue to help us make Yahoo! Maps the best mapping system out there. If you haven’t yet used the Yahoo! Maps and Local suggestion board, check it out.

Cheers!

Michael Lawless, Sr Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps

As many of you know, Where 2.0 was earlier this week and Digital Earth 5 is next week. Bridging the gap, Yahoo! is hosting WhereCamp, a free ‘unconference’ at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus, focusing on all things Map and Geography related. The fun starts Saturday morning at 10am, bring a sleeping bag and spend the weekend if you dare.

Check out more info on Yodel or in Upcoming, or just sign yourself up on the WhereCamp Wiki.

Cheers!

Mike Lawless, Sr Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps

Thanks to everyone who attended the Mashup & Eatup Lunch at Where 2.0 yesterday.  This event had a big response, so if you couldn’t make it, here are the presentations for Flash & AJAX as well as our Introduction.

We had quite an interactive group with many interesting questions and comments. A few questions came up more than once:

• Can I create a mashup and use it (live) outside the browser with the Flash API?
  Yes! Using the AS Flash API, you can publish your mashup as an .exe file. After attaching the map component in the Flash IDE (on the stage or programmatically) and completing your mashup, go into File > Publish Settings. Select the “Windows Projector” box and click “Publish”.
• How many free geocodes per day does Yahoo!’s API provide?
  Currently our AJAX and Flash APIs provide up to 50,000 geocodes per day using built-in methods. Just pass in your addresses and the API does all the work for you.
• Is there a way for me to tell Yahoo! about my Application or Mashup?
  Yes, we recommend that you join our Yahoo! Maps Developer Community and post to that list. Then submit what you’ve built to the Yahoo! Gallery so the world can see it. 
• What kind of content is available to me for my mashup?
  Yahoo! has a variety of content for you to choose from. There’s Local Search, Traffic, Flickr and Upcoming.org to name a few and a whole bunch of RSS feeds for everything from Groups to Shopping.

It was great chatting with everyone at the Mashup & Eatup Lunch.  Thanks again to all who made it.  And for those who didn’t make it, we plan to do this again very soon. Keep on eye on the Yahoo! Maps Developer Community and this blog for updates.

Keep the Mashups coming!

Chuck, Mirek & Vince
Yahoo! Maps

We’ll be hanging out in our own backyard this week at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose. What is the Where 2.0 Conference about? According to O’Reilly “The Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues leading the charge into the location based technological frontier.” We think it’s also a great opportunity to see what everyone is working on in the Local space. 

Stop by the Yahoo! booth – we’re always interested in talking with more people in this space. For Maps developers we’ll also be hosting a Mashup & Eatup Lunch - if you’d like to join us please RSVP soon, there are just a few spots left. The whole gang from Local, Maps and Upcoming.org will be there. Hope to see you there!

The Yahoo! Local Team 

I am delighted to welcome you to our new Local Blog, brought to you by the Yahoo! Local and Maps team.

Whether you’re a user, merchant, publisher or developer, if you’re interested in Local or Maps, this is the place for you. Big things are happening with Yahoo! Local and Maps, and we’re continually adding items that don’t always get a big announcement. Here, we’ll point out both big and small new features in our product and APIs. We’d also love to make this a place to spotlight you - highlighting activities and gathering input from some of our favorite contributors, merchants & developers.

This blog is for you! We welcome your suggestions so we can continue our mission of enabling people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. The Local team and I look forward to sharing what we’re working on, but even more so, the opportunity to hear your ideas and feedback. Don’t be shy! Once again, welcome, and if you can’t wait to find out what’s subscribe to our RSS feed or add our blog to your My Yahoo!

Paul Levine, GM Yahoo! Local and Maps