Drop-Down Maps & Other Enhanced Data Appearing In Yahoo Hotel Search Results

Yahoo has been building out much richer Shortcuts, rolling out new ones almost daily. Here are recent additions, sports and music, for example. Yahoo has also done this for some time with restaurant reviews (e.g., “Sushi, San Francisco“) and more recently travel (e.g., “London“). Locallytype noticed that some hotel searches are now starting to show expandable, drop-down maps in search results.

Here’s an example for the Vancouver, BC Century Plaza Hotel:

Interestingly, this expandable map feature doesn’t always come up. Compare “Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles“:

And compare “W Hotel New York,” which shows a map in the Shortcut without the expand button.

It would thus appear that Yahoo is experimenting with results to see how users interact with them. My personal preference is the Shortcut with the map and other data (see., e.g., London or W Hotel examples above), minus the expand button.