MediaPost.com (www.mediapost.com) announced on December 9 that the search engine giant Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) has moved to expand its local search offerings by allowing merchants to easily add detailed information about their businesses to the Yahoo local search results pages.
The new initiative allows business owners to submit basic facts such as their hours, addresses, Web sites, phone numbers, category, operating information, and the nature of the services or products sold, at no charge, to be included on a page detailing their business. Entrepreneurs can also pay $9.95 a month for premium listings, which can include a tagline, business description, links to coupons, photos, and performance reviews.
A company spokeswoman said that any material sent by merchants will be reviewed by Yahoo before being posted, and that Yahoo's goal is to increase the comprehensiveness of its local search listings. Yahoo, which launched the local search engine http://local.yahoo.com in October after two months of testing, currently has about 15 million local business listings. To date, they have mostly been generated by Yahoo's crawler, and by information from other online directories that partner with Yahoo.
