Find Local Business Information at Your Fingertips
- Posted July 30th, 2009 at 7:00 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Search
Many of you are probably already familiar with the Yahoo! Shortcut that appears at the top of the Yahoo! Search results page when you search for a local business,. Starting today, we’re enhancing the Yahoo! Shortcut for local businesses to include links to information you care about most and an overlay that displays content directly on the search results page.
For example, if you conduct a search on a business, such as “Coupa Café Palo Alto,” you will see the following Shortcut:
You can now see a selection of images and reviews for the business directly on the search results page by clicking the “Reviews” and “Photos” tabs on the Shortcut, saving you time and giving you the information you need in one place:
We’ve enhanced the Shortcut for category searches too, for when you are searching for a type of business and don’t have a specific business name in mind. For example, when you search “sushi palo alto,” you’ll see a list of sushi restaurants in Palo Alto in the Shortcut, which again pulls content directly onto the page to help you decide where to go:
The local enhanced Shortcut brings the most relevant information from across the Web so you can find what you need in one place. It is also a part of our continuing effort to better understand query intent – what users mean in their queries – and to match it with the right content. About 20 percent of online searches have a local intent, where users are looking for businesses, organizations, events, and other information in a specific geographic area. Not only does this enhanced Shortcut make your time online more efficient, but it also helps you make the best use of your time when you’re off the Internet.
So give the local enhanced shortcut a try – remember that you can always find local business information by searching by city (“giordanos chicago“) or by zip code (“florist 94041“). Let us know what you think.
Nitzan Achsaf
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
- 20 Comments
- Subscribe
This looks great, it is just a real shame that it is not available in the UK. Sadly the UK Yahoo Local Search experience is terrible, just a glorified classifieds section.
Why can’t we have the same as US searchers?
Regards
Marc Liron – UK Local Search Specialist
The experience is just Wow!. We definitely want to see more of this for other countries as well
Awesome is all I can Say!!!!!
Thanks
Jason Berkes
Thanks for the great info. How do we maintain our company listing on Yahoo Shortcut.
Best regards to all,
Pablo Gutierrez
Limerock Architectural Painters
(305)803-1110
Is yahoo reading Microformats relied to these features (Rating, Geo, hreview…) ?
It would be nice to find different reviews from many websites ;)
Seems like a much better user experience. That is what it takes to get visitors coming back repeatedly.
It’s great !!!
The new format looks good, but the content is terrible where I live. Yahoo Local Canada doesn’t know there’s a Walmart and Costco in Abbotsford. On Google I just type ‘Costco Abbotsford’.
The content is good here in Ohio and I am glad to see this search area improved – especially for small business.
Is yahoo reading Microformats relied to these features?
When you do a search for a local company – can anyone tell how citysearch.com prevents people from getting back to Yahoo?
Example: http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu8ZHFYhK.BYBQAtXNyoA?p=mindleaders+MA&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=sb-top&sao=1
First result = http://national.citysearch.com/profile/41515312/marlborough_ma/mind_leaders.html?publisher=smx_noncust&reference_id=1&placement=yp
After clicking through to the page if you click the “Read Reviews” button – how do they make it so you can’t get back to the Yahoo results? (disable back button?)
Thats good. Great functions to have the review and overview and maps all together.
Why can’t I do something as simple as searching my e-mails?
What a joke.
The content is good here in Ohio and I am glad to see this search area improved – especially for small business.
That’s great. I have used these functions frequently. Well done.
Looks cool. But Just wondering if these results are served and fetched from Microsoft Bing or Yahoo’s own data.
Thanks
Shaun
This is a great feature similar to Google Maps. I hear Yahoo has something up their sleeves to give Google a run for their money!!!
thankyou yahoo
It’s a very great idea.
It’s a very great idea