Draw Your Own Search Results: Yahoo Sketch-a-Search

February 11, 2010 - By admin on Yahoo. 0

Yahoo are currently testing a new search technology called Sketch-a-Search. This is Yahoo’s effort for make local searching on mobiles a lot easier.

The main feature is the ability to circle or draw an area in which you wish to limit the search. An example would be if you were searching for Accountants in Leeds and you wanted a specific area, say the city centre. With this tool you could circle the city centre on the map and it would then refine the results to that area.

I think the idea behind simplifying results for mobile searching is great! However I’m not sure how much of an innovation this really is. Currently you can search for local results on the iPhone in Google Maps and this will pinpoint results on the map, so I don’t think being able to refine the results after this will be that much help to the user as you can already see where the results are!

The idea behind this is to limit typing, however I’m petty sure that typing will still need to be involved if you were looking for a certain type business, If you were looking for a Restaurant you would have to type Restaurant.

This technology is still in Yahoo Labs in the testing phase, so there may be more developments on the actual user experience and if they can reduce the need for any typing at all that would make this technology much more interesting!

Infoserve currently provide local listings for UK Businesses in Yahoo, you can get your business listed from £199