In regards to my Local history : I would like to see suggestions of different businesses in the town I'm researching or possibly visiting, not my home town.

Example, if I tend to search for an review coffee joints in various towns and check out the Yahoo Local page for Brooklyn, NY - I would expect to automatically be served recommended places to buy coffee in Brooklyn, not the town I live in.

Currently, regardless of the town I research, I'm being served history suggestions for the town I live in (or have searched for or read results for).

I don' know if you guys plan to extend this tool outside the USA but I see a great potential here to compete with touristic books such as Lonely planet & co
I'd use it a lot even for my home town here in France. I have to say I hardly use it for the moment

Will there be an API made available for sites to integrate Yahoo Local services?

"And it's RSS enabled."

Exactly how does this work with RSS? Could someone post an example? I'm a bit fuzzy on how RSS works, and this mention of it threw me for a loop.

Just curious.

How about rest of the world?

To: Brandon
wrt: RSS

search RSS on yahoo... click the second result with the red yahoo icon "Y!" - really simple to understand. For better understanding and a non-Yahoo perspective you might want to read it at Wikipedia.

To: An

Thanks for the info. I've got a better understanding of how it works now, and how to set it up in my own profile.

But what I'm wondering is: how is Yahoo's improved localized search/content an RSS feed? Exactly *what* is sent through this channel? Coming events, I understand, and perhaps top searches that week, but new directory listings? Phone number search?

Basically, I get Yahoo! Local, and I get RSS, but what do they create together? That's what I'm wondering.

First off, thanks a ton for the great feedback. Forgive me for the long post but I thought it best to address multiple comments at one time.

I totally agree that we've just scratched the surface on the potential for recommendations. Tailoring the suggestions based on an understanding of a user’s likes as described above is definitely a direction we want to go. And of course, we'll always empower users to turn off such a feature if they wish.

While I can't comment specifically on our international plans, rest assured that we're committed to extending the work done for the U.S. to other countries.

Regarding verification, we work hard in conjunction with our data providers to ensure the highest quality data possible. In addition, we have a program for business owners where they can add, update, or enhance their business’ listing for free. That service is available at http://listings.local.yahoo.com.

We actually do have and API available for Yahoo! Local on the Yahoo! Developer Network. Check it out at
http://developer.yahoo.net/search/local/V1/localSearch.html

The Local RSS feeds are available on each city page (enter your city on http://local.yahoo.com to see the content for your hometown). In the left column, you’ll see three feeds to choose from: Upcoming Events, Restaurant Recommendations from Yahoo! Local users, and Local Favorites (recommendations from users across the full spectrum of categories in Local). You can click on the orange RSS button to obtain the XML directly for usage in any RSS feed reader or you can click on the My Yahoo! button to add the feed to your My Yahoo! page. Once you've added a feed, daily updates will automatically be provided so you can always stay current on what's going on in your area.

Once again, thanks everyone for trying out Yahoo! Local and for giving such valuable feedback. Keep it coming!

-Brian

* * * Very impressive - very practical! * * *

The "Auto Zoom Map" is a stroke of Genius - and surprisingly fast -

"The DHTML Location-based Tool Tips" with added info - are also very helpful -

The recommendations by other users - as well as the entertainment outlines can be useful for out of towners.

One minor suggestion: allow the preference customization of text and background colors and themes for each user - and add local news feeds.

GOOD LUCK WITH THIS PROJECT - EXPECT MORE GREAT THINGS FROM Y! IN THE FUTURE :-)

Congratulations on your initiative. All communities and businesses are local

Michael is building a complimentary site for local communities http://deepblog.com/db2.html Deep Blog Local

New Players Offer Deep Web Access to Facilitate Online Job Search: http://www.simplyhired.com/ Simply Hired and http://www.indeed.com/ Indeed, upstarts less than a year old, are getting attention for their Google-like approach to helping people find jobs. They do for job listings what Google does for general information -- crawl or "scrape" listings from thousands of sites and create a free, searchable index in one spot." http://www.bizreport.com/news/9201/ Simply Amazing
Glenbrook, run by a father-daughter team, demonstrated its technology by building a search engine that scoops up job listings from the databases of various Web sites, something the company claims most search engines cannot do http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/12403171.htm Duo's search engine scours 'hidden' sites

Hi --

I have some events I would like to see on the new Yahoo! local. How can I list them???

Thanks!

sonja

My community, Upper Falls, West Virginia, shares a ZIP Code with another (The ridiculously named Tornado, WV.) I always use the name Upper Falls, including in my Yahoo! member registration. The problem is that Yahoo! Local defaults to the location "Tornado" despite my stated preference in my registration. Clearly, Yahoo! Local uses my registration data to determine the appropriate location to display when I visit http://local.yahoo.com/. But the application still gets it wrong. The weather data displayed on the Yahoo! home page suffers from the same problem. Even when I manually correct the location displayed on both Yahoo! Local and the Yahoo! home page, the correct display is not persistent. The next day, it's wrong again, on both Yahoo! Local and the Yahoo! home page.

The Yahoo! Local Listings edit utility contains a bug. The categories menu under "Landmarks" lists a subcategory named "Steams." This should actually be "Streams." Selecting this option in the utility adds a listing to the "Streams" subcategory, but the listing is labeled "Steams." Yahoo! Local search then only works when searching for "Steams" and not for the correct "Streams." This is rather absurd, really. It was produced by a simple typo in coding the menu, but it now affects all rivers, streams and creeks in all of Yahoo! Local!!!

How can I refine my search based on a particular search category, within the search results?

Thanks

Ali