A hefty list of new features were added to Microsoft’s Live Local Search yesterday and just tonight to Yahoo! Local. As both rivals get stronger, you can’t help but wonder what’s going to come after coupons for Google’s local search. Both Yahoo! and Live Local are looking good.
Yahoo! Local
Yahoo! Local now lets search users build personal collections of search results, tag locations, write reviews, see recommendations, upload pictures and build sideshows all in a dashboard based service called “my local.” Photos you tie to a particular location and mark public are visible to other users when they look at the location’s profile page on Yahoo! Local search.
I haven’t been able to tell yet whether there’s any Flickr integration with Yahoo! Local Search, but that would be a very logical step. Given that there were 1.2 million Flickr photos geotagged in the first 24 hours that the feature was available, you can imagine how powerful integration of public, geotagged photos with local search could be.
This upgraded Yahoo! Local is impressive. It’s a lot like Yahoo! TripPlanner, but I foresee it being much more useful. Google’s local search is pretty good, and I appreciate the reviews they pull in, but Yahoo! functionality appears to have taken the lead. I use Google local search every time I go to a new restaurant, for example, but I think I’m going to be trying Yahoo! and Live first for awhile. That said, integration of the several related domains on Yahoo! is still quite awkward and I hope that will change.
Live.com Local
Microsoft’s Live Local Search added new features yesterday as well. Those include a white-pages style people search, the ability to draw on and annotate maps and a cool feature to have any business’s details sent by text message to your mobile phone so you’ll have them without going online. Live Local already offered a service to simultaneously connect your phone and a business’s phone with one click.
This Live Local upgrade also extended to more than 100 the list of cities you can get a Virtual Earth powered “bird’s eye view” of. The Live Local team says that there are now hundreds of thousands of new WiFi access points that Live uses for its “locate me” feature - determining your physical location on its map.
Update: Live just put out a mobile version, see CrunchGear for coverage.
It’s been clear that local search has always had a lot of potential; it’s exciting to see these two major players innovating and making it a much richer experience. As the usefulness of local search grows, so does the business that can go on there. I love many Google services, but its local search is looking pretty sparse now compared to Yahoo! and Live. Ask.com’s local search and Plazes are worth a look as well. There’s a whole lot going on in local search these days.
It’s about time Windows Live Local makes some headlines. I’ve always been of the opinion that they are currently the front-runners in online mapping services. I think this is a key area where Windows Live can out-run the competition.
It’s all about healthy competition… They say that without Coca Cola, Pepsi would not be as successful and vice versa. Google, Yahoo and MSN need each other as Pepsi needed Coca Cola. The end result hopefully will be that consumers will end up with better product. Way to go America!
I agree with Vlad - this Yahoo! vs. Microsoft vs. Google competition will be fun to observe and will lead to great products.
Just never ever let them merge!
Actually, its about time they protected our privacy.
http://www.blackboxsearch.com
I tried using Live.com to search for some Mustang pics… I’m still waiting…
Hi,
I like the windows live local search, yahoo and google…they’re all quite good but the best one is the Live one.
Thanks
I must admit I havent even used either of them since they were first revealed. I was really impressed with the search relevance when looking for local companies.
Yahoo’s travel planner was new to me until today, with Flickr images aswell, the future looks promising!
Indeed it is clear that local search has enormous potential and it is exciting to see how the major players have been embracing this opportunity. It will be interesting to see how these sites are used instead of their social networking alternatives like Yelp.com in the US and TrustedPlaces.com in Europe.
Also, check out the new mobile version of Live, including search ( & ).
As somebody working on a startup that’s building software tools for student and community newsrooms, I’m worried that local search will be the beginning of the end of local newspapers just like search + contextual ads were for national newspapers.
I say that because revenues for national newspapers (and other media) are already way down, but local news has stayed strong — stayed strong because they have so far done the best job of providing information that local communities want.
The question to me: will Yahoo, MS or Goog be able to get so deep into people’s local communities that the local newspaper becomes irrelevant?
I think already online local searches are playing a bigger role than local newspapers and over a period of time this Yahoo! vs. Microsoft vs. Google competition will make these local nespapers irrelevant
Thanks. These new features and models are great. However, the truly significant functional leap will occur when there exists greater connection of search to offline behavioral and transactional data.
Since these local models are largely about how to order the world of (local in this case) information, consider for a minute the improved level of customization, predictability and presence of outputs.
Though difficult, the network density of City-based and local programs (like those in London for instance) are a likely target for the emergence of that business model, as I’ve written about here:
http://www.womm.com/womm/2006/.....#trackback
I have been trying to search on Live Local for the past week. No luck. It seems to me that MS has taken a big step backward, since now you have to put in a what and a where to do the search to get to the map. I would just like to go to the map, if I choose to.
It’s a piece.
Google all the way.
Competition among these big players will definitely drive more useful functions for local search. For myself, I still think local search powered by social networking has more potential, just like how Wikipedia has been growing so quickly and become so useful. I have been using Yelp.com when I need to research Bay area businesses. My recent favorite is Rrove.com, which allows people all over the world to add places and create collections to shared with friends. It automatically pulls flickr photos, wikipedia articles and local events along with user reviews. I can see sites like this have the potential to provide richer experiences in long run because it is powered by us, the Internet community. The openness of web 2.0 can provide a lot of creative usages of these services.
Sorry, this is my first post on TechCrunch. The urls in my comment above did not work. The web2.0 sites I mentioned are Yelp.com and Rrove.com. There are more out there, like plazes, and prototyping sites like tagzania.