Yahoo India has launched the local search engine (public beta launch). Here is the link.
The local search is currently available in the top 4 cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. The Product is Integrated with Yahoo Maps. The interface is great and it combines the map’s ability to generate directions. So if you search for a location, you can also map it and get directions at the same time from your location. To have a look at a sample – check this out.
There is also a cool ‘send to mobile’ feature. It allows you to send the listings of a particular location to a mobile phone. Which is awesome. You can send 3 listings per day so before you think about replacing all the local listing companies present.
There is also an Essential List feature – a printable ready reckoner for localities.
Ashish Sinha from Pluggd.in gives the following examples:“Currently, the product offers two type of essentialists for selected localities (for e.g. ‘Moving to Koramangala, Getting Married in Koramangala) and the idea can be easily expanded to several other contexts (and cities).”
Sridhar from dotdot.in also reviewed Yahoo Local Search and being a techie, his only reason ‘was to verify the service if its foolproof’.
The comments section for reviewing a listing supports HTML tags and its easy to add some iframe or a JS tags to manipulate and structure the data contents. Sridhar has tried to use an iframe and referred Google, by making the use of Javascript. You could also redirect pages and other things that tickle your imagination.
I have been using Yahoo! Maps for a while now and that’s where they were showing local listings anyway. So I think they had the capabilities (and were lazy) – this is just a souped up product!
Have a look at a review of all local search engine updates for 2007 here.
