Yodel Down Under!

Local Business Information in a Jiffy

October 9th, 2009 Filed in: General,Product Pulse Add comment

(2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Most of you are probably familiar with Yahoo!7 Shortcuts that appear at the top of certain web search queries, such as Weather Sydney.

We’re now enhancing shortcuts to include business listings in the Yahoo!7 Search results page to get you to your local business information faster.

A significant proportion of our queries have a local intent, where users are looking for busines details, organisations, events, and other information within a specific geographic area. The new Yahoo!7 Local Shortcut gives users the local info they need to make decisions about where to eat, stay, shop and play, even faster than before.

For example, if you search for "Restaurants Manly", a range of results are returned ordered by a number of factors including distance from search location, category and rating. For example, give it a try now: restaurants manly.

For business chains, we’ll show up to three stores nearest the search location.
For example: Bunnings Melbourne.

If you are looking for a nice restaurant that had been recommended to you by a friend, say Strangers with Candy Redfern (one of my favourite restaurants!), you’ll see a "business card" display for the business, with relevant information such as address, phone number, ratings and number of reviews.

We’ll be activating more and more of these "business card displays" as time goes by, so stay tuned!

The business data displayed is provided by our data partner, TrueLocal.com.au, so if you’re looking to have your business found in Yahoo!7 Search, make sure your business is included. If it’s not already, you can add it here.

So give the Local Shortcut a try. As always, we’re keen to hear what you think!

Justin O’Neill
Product Manager, Yahoo!7 Local