: Yahoo Searching Gets Social - 

The Holy Grail for search engines is to return the most relevant results. Because of the nature of the English (and some other) languages, though, two or more people searching on the same word will want different results; "bass" means one thing to a fisherman and another thing to a musician. Yahoo thinks it has found a way around that -- by harnessing the power of community to deliver more relevant, personalized search results.

: Yahoo!'s Long-term Strategy: Diversify

: Yahoo! Audio Search, a music pioneer?

: Next Generation of Yahoo! Local - From Yahoo! Search Blog

: Yahoo! Local Freshly Updated

Yahoo! released its updated user interface and and feature set for Yahoo! Local. John Battelle has a very nice write up on it with inside information from Paul Levine, head of Yahoo Local Search. Danny Sullivan gives a write up of feature sets. Let's not forget to add Jeff Weiner's thoughts on local search and the changing face of media.

Forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Moderator, Chicago's thoughts on this new Yahoo! Local:

- A deeper more broad definition of "local search"
- Fostering a sense of community
- Movement from business lookup to an augmentation of local behavior patterns
- The realization that local search includes events, activities, and other time-based local actions
- Personalization and leveraging user data
- Deeper content integration from disparate local based content within the Y network in a local destination
- Drill down: From city to neighborhood
- Freshness
- Destination: City portal characteristics
- Further emphasis on user generated content
- One step closer to the integration of social networking