Yahoo Canada has shuttered its Yahoo Local service, replacing it with a co-branded local search experience with Yellow Pages Group (YPG).
The service, which utilizes YPG’s YellowAPI technology, is an expansion of a partnership that launched six years ago in which Yellow Pages provided its basic local listings to Yahoo.
Local search results are now pulled from YPG’s data set that includes content on local businesses such as hours of operation, photos, videos, ratings and reviews.
According to the two companies, the changes mean users’ results will be better organized based on their search history or location, and the technology ensures users receive more accurate results based on where they are.
Yahoo users can perform a search on Yahoo.ca and then click on the “Local” tab, which takes them to a results page that features Yahoo Canada’s branding and a personalized mapping experience.
Gina Cothey, senior director of audience at Yahoo Canada, said the local search previously “wasn’t a property that we were focused on initially, so it was quite difficult to get to,” involving several clicks within Yahoo’s navigation.
She added that Yahoo Canada looked at what people were searching for through Yahoo Search, how they were navigating through and whether they were getting relevant results. “We know that a large percentage of our users were searching for local terms,” said Cothey. “So if our users want good local results and were not able to fulfill that through search, we wanted to find a way to integrated the local listings into the search results.” With YellowAPI, “we believe we’re giving the user a better experience.”
YellowAPI has listings for 1.5 million Canadian businesses, “whether they’re a paid advertiser or not,” said Darby Sieben, director of business development at Yellow Pages Group.
