Not to be outdone by all those other beta services on-line, as of this morning you can try the Yahoo! Local Beta.

For the longest time, I've used Yahoo! Yellow Pages when I needed to find something in a specific area. But in the last few weeks of playing with the internal beta of Yahoo! Local, I've been pretty happy. In almost all cases it's at least as good as YP, but usually a lot better. The ability to selectively refine a result set is very handy when you get too many results. And the "View Results on Map" is something I wish we had a long time ago.

It looks like the version launched still has a couple of the usability quirks that I hoped would be fixed by now (like not being able to click column labels to re-sort the results instead of using the non-intuitive menu control), but hey.... It's a beta, right? :-)

Anyway, give it a try. Even with that omission, it seems to beat the pants off "similar" services that I've mentioned before. Despite my best efforts, I've yet to get random strip clubs in the results.

I'm especially interested in hearing about surprising results or searches for which we don't do a very good job. I'll pass the info along to the Local team. Of course, other bug reports are welcome too.

Update: I see that John Battelle is reporting on it now too. He "found it pretty damn good." Excellent.

Posted by jzawodn at August 03, 2004 09:23 AM

Reader Comments
# Paul Dunbar said:

neat, I'd personally prefer to see more of this style javascript in the future for other yahoo features.

on August 3, 2004 09:55 AM
# kim said:

i like it already...

on August 3, 2004 02:10 PM
# Matt said:

It would be nice if you could submit updated information for listings. Like adding their website for example. Also if you are not searching in more populated area the maps are usually zoomed in way too far. In general a great way to expand on the Yahoo! Yellow Pages...

on August 3, 2004 02:28 PM
# Dan said:

It's got potential, although I guess the database only works with the US at the moment. It let me set a UK location up out of a list of a few countries, but searches for generic things like "restaurant" in the region of my location don't bring anything up.

Also the Javascript for the My Locations drop down doesn't work in Konqueror (I wonder about Safari?)

on August 4, 2004 02:46 AM
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