Oh, the irony. One day after it was announced that Microsoft’s Bing will be replacing Yahoo’s own search engine on Yahoo.com, Yahoo! came out with a new local search functionality that ought to be the envy of every search engine.
Searching for local businesses on Yahoo now brings up a nice interface containing reviews, an overview, photos and driving directions inside a drop down box you can access without leaving the page you’re on. It’s a smoother user experience than Google or Bing offers and Yahoo may have more local business information than either of those two competitors can offer in-house as well.
The new Yahoo local search presentation is much more informative than what Bing offers and it’s more graceful than what Google offers. Even on local searches where Google does have a lot of information, you often have to click over to a Google Maps page to learn more about a particular business. Removing that one pageload makes a big difference in a single user’s experience – multiply that by millions and millions of people searching and this little change is a pretty big deal.
Presumably it will be replaced with Bing soon. Bing will no doubt improve, perhaps it will leverage some of what Yahoo! has already, but on face it seems like another loss of innovation and quality user experience due to trouble with monetization.
