Get the Dish That You Wish

I had a yen for tuna sashimi after watching Iron Chef the other night, but I didn’t know where to go to satisfy my craving. Starting today, we are introducing a new feature that makes it easier to search for specific menu items for the times when you know what you want to eat but don’t know where to go.

By extracting structured content – in this case, menu items – from unstructured web pages and matching them to restaurant entities, Yahoo! Search can return results of restaurants near you that serve the dish you crave for when you enter the name of the dish in the search box. You can also try this experience in Yahoo! Local.

For example, to find a nearby restaurant serving tuna sashimi, I type “tuna sashimi San Francisco” in the search box. You can type the name of the city and state, or just use the zip code of your location. You’ll see a list of restaurants that serve tuna sashimi on the menu. I can then narrow down the results by my neighborhood or read more about the business in the overview tab. I can also discover more menu items that I might be interested in.

Yesterday folks around the office were hungry for biryani, so we quickly searched for “biryani palo alto”:

Go ahead, give this feature a try by searching for your favorite menu items near you. We are continuing our efforts on improving our overall local intent experiences on Yahoo! Search, so let us know what you think.

Nitzan Achsaf
Product Lead, Vertical Intent Experiences