We just made it easier to search for local businesses. Starting today, you can see the Yahoo! local business shortcut when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. You can also refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page.

We’ve seen in our user studies that, in many cases, users search for a local business without specifying a location but still want to see a Yahoo! Shortcut for that business. Now, they can. For example, if you are in the Palo Alto area and search for “evvia,” Yahoo! Search displays the local shortcut for the restaurant, including address, phone number, and reviews.

This also works when you search for business categories. Try searching for “yoga” or “auto repair”.

In addition, when you search for business categories or business chains, you can now filter the results further by neighborhood or nearby cities in one click. If the location is a major city, you can filter the results by neighborhood. Otherwise, you can refine the results by nearby cities. For example, if I searched for “Dentists San Francisco” and then decide I want to see only dentists in my neighborhood, I can click “Noe Valley” and the shortcut shows only dentists near me.

We hope you find our efforts to make Yahoo! Search more personally relevant to be useful for your local queries. Please try it out in Yahoo! Search today and let us know what you think.

Nitzan Achsaf

Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Search