Yahoo! Local Maps (beta)

The folks at Yahoo! used some pretty intuitive icons to identify their Local and Maps pages.

Yahoo! Local is chock full of our neighborhood's goings on. We couldn't survey more than a smattering of localities, but all those we did check out had lots of info. This is thanks largely to the acquisition of upcoming.org last year, a social event calendar site. You should find plenty of subcategories populating the pages for your town or even neighborhood in some cases. Whether it's what "People are asking about," or "Browse All Categories" (which incorporates Automotive, Computers & Electronics, and 13 other categories followed by breakouts of numerous more specific subcategories nested within them) you should find a great deal to explore. Without question, we found the local experience broader, deeper, and more tailored for our area with Yahoo! Local than any of the other services we reviewed for this story.

We were very impressed with the Yahoo! Local site, though we would like to see the full functionality of the beta Maps page eventually available there.

We found the main page of Yahoo! Maps Local Beta well-organized and inviting.

We thought the main map page interface was pretty intuitive and easy to navigate and also liked the prominent feedback section at the bottom of the page.

We really liked the slider on the Yahoo! Maps Local beta page. It allows you to very fluidly zoom in on an area.

One criticism we can level against all the sites is that so much of their focus has been placed on including businesses and have missed the boat (pun intended) on some non-profit attractions and parks. For instance, several different searches failed to turn up a massive landmark here in our back yard along the Hudson River---a veteran World War II aircraft carrier turned museum---the USS Intrepid.

One thing we liked in Yahoo! Local Maps beta was the "top 5 questions" listed under the Help menu. One of these, how to map an intersection, something we had a question about. We're hoping that the Yahoo! folks will be integrating some of this info into their interface.

We tried to make use of the "saved locations feature" within Yahoo! Local Maps beta, and while it seemed to have saved them we got back an error message when clicking on any of them.

Here's the error message we received when attempting to return to some of our saved locations. As with any beta site you can expect a glitch here and there.

This one left us scratching our head. Note that the engine couldn't find the park we were looking for on this page, even though it is in fact the unamed park in the lower right-hand portion of the screen. Now look at the next slide.

It does however appear in the slider window when we zoom out a bit and are no longer searching for it. Hmmmm.