Yandex . . . has purchased a license for digital maps supplied by the leading global location content provider, NAVTEQ. These digital maps will be used in the development of a detailed world map for the Yandex.Maps service.

NAVTEQ has provided Yandex with maps from all over the world, including highly detailed maps of Europe, North America, Australia and developed countries in Asia. These maps show intercity motorways, urban traffic networks, streets and buildings. Yandex.Maps will gradually add new content both to its desktop version and to its mobile application that supports all major platforms. Using the Yandex.Maps API, website owners can embed maps of various countries into their resources.

The company has been running a test with Navteq data in Turkey. Above is an image from Yandex Maps (pre-Navteq) of the San Francisco Bay Area. Yandex now joins Bing and Yahoo in heavily or totally relying on map data from the Nokia subsidiary.

The reliance of major search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Yandex on Navteq for mapping data sets up a kind of global divide of sorts among mapping sites “powered by” Navteq and Google Maps (and those in its network). There are other, independent mapping providers out there like deCarta as well.

Yandex recently lead a $30 million round in independent search engine Blekko. Yandex operates in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and has a presence in Palo Alto, where its Yandex Labs is based.

Related Entries

• Nokia Now “Powering” Bing Maps
• Bing Maps To Be Powered (Replaced) By Nokia?
• Powered By Nokia, The New Yahoo Maps Goes Live
• Microsoft vs. Google: Street Photography Rigs Compared
• Bing To Become Default Search (And Maps) On RIM BlackBerry Devices
• Bing Maps Overhauls Interface, Exposes Map Apps To All
• Yandex Expands To Turkey, First Shots Fired In New Google, Baidu & Yandex Stand Off
• Yandex, Facebook Strike A Deal For Status Updates
• Yandex Launches English-Language Version Its Webmaster Tools

NokiHoo maps are also available in other places around the world, such as Europe, but Yahoo doesn’t have the data or has incomplete data outside of the areas identified above. I did some searching in the UK around London and the data just aren’t there yet. In fairness to Yahoo they haven’t publicly announced areas outside the US and Canada.

When the NokiHoo deal was first announced in May of last year, I wrote that it would potentially improve Yahoo Maps and could open the door to Yahoo-branded mobile navigation or other map-based offerings. I assumed that it would make Yahoo Maps better and that the company might leverage a range of things that Nokia is doing, including Street View-like imagery.

In this initial relaunch none of that is in evidence. I’m generally not impressed.

Though this is only the first “iteration” and the maps cosmetically appear improved in certain ways, the addition of multiple search boxes creates complexity and potential errors. It’s also a step backward from the single maps search box used by Google, Mapquest, Bing — and even Nokia itself.

The “find a location” and “find a business” boxes are somewhat redundant. However if I use “find a location” (single search box vs. two for “find a business”) I get errors if the location isn’t obvious. Yahoo Maps uses IP targeting to set a default location.

You get almost an identical experience on Nokia Maps if you do the same searches. However I would argue the UI and general experience on Yahoo are better overall.

Nokia data is also going to take on a larger role over at Bing Maps as well, as part of the partnership agreement between Nokia and Microsoft. Nokia and subsidiary Navteq are the clear beneficiaries of these deals and may ultimately be able to claim Yahoo (and maybe Bing Maps) as part of the company’s local-mobile ad network. But that remains to be determined.

While there are multiple improvements or enhancements on the new Yahoo Maps “under the hood” (e.g., better routing) there’s nothing in the UI/UX to cause people to choose them over Google Maps. That’s the bottom line.

These “apps” allow users to do a number of things from within the search results. For example, Sketch-a-search allows users to launch a window and search for restaurants by drawing a custom geographic area on a map.

The Restaurant Comparison Quick App builds a grid display of similar restaurants (or geographically relevant restaurants) and enables users to compare them across a number of criteria. You first search for a restaurant and then select the “compare similar” button (there’s also a “make reservation” button powered by OpenTable).

For a fleeting moment this grid reminded me of Google Squared. However Google Squared is still highly experimental and not very useful, except in a few situations.

I assume that tagging and some sort of back-end taxonomy or classification scheme enables the Quick App here to deliver comparable local restaurants to the one searched for (hence my Pandora analogy). I found the results to be pretty good though somewhat uneven in terms of alternative recommendations. Still it’s useful as a discovery tool.

It’s also especially interesting to see all this structured data and functionality being delivered directly in the SERP. Yahoo is starting to make good on its promise to “innovate around the UI” and search user experience. These Quick Apps are some nice examples of that effort.

The new desktop beta offers a stream-like display of local news, deals, events, and other content that comes from Yahoo editors, local websites and blogs, and community members contributing directly to Yahoo Local. A lot of that content is new to Yahoo Local; some of it expands on Yahoo’s recent focus on Deals-based content and some is made possible by the company’s push into hyperlocal content in recent months, as well as its purchase of Associated Content earlier this year. (If adoption picks up, the new Yahoo Local could become a hyperlocal blog/content network to be reckoned with.)

As Greg pointed out in his article, the local search box is gone and there’s not even a map showing (but there is a “maps & directions” link in the right column).

You can see all this on the beta page (desktop version) for San Francisco, or one of the other cities and neighborhoods where the beta is available. If you live in one of those 30 or so towns, you can access the beta at http://beta.local.yahoo.com.

The New Yahoo Local On Mobile

What’s new to today’s announcements is the availability of the Yahoo Local beta where it will really be most important: on mobile devices. After choosing your neighborhood, Yahoo presents a mix of hyperlocal news, events, and offers.

It’s an interesting mix of content. I’m seeing movie listings, Groupon offers (not shown above but further down the screen), videos from Turn Here, events from Yahoo’s Upcoming.org property, and articles from hyperlocal blogs.

But, as Greg pointed out in his article a couple weeks ago about the desktop version, it’s not very useful as a tool for finding local businesses — and that’s one of the primary mobile use cases. For now, and specifically for me as an iPhone user, that task is better handled by Yahoo’s traditional mobile app.

The new Yahoo Local is in beta for now, so I’ll be curious to see if local business search/discovery gets added as Yahoo continues to refine the product.

Postscript, December 9: In regard to my question in the paragraph above, it seems unlikely that local business search will be added to the new Yahoo Local. Through its PR reps, Yahoo has clarified that Yahoo Local is about “local discovery” instead of “local search,” and asked that we correct the mention in the first paragraph of a “local search interface.”

Facebook Places. So Facebook may not be so “off-the-grid” at the moment, but Facebook Place pages still are. While millions of businesses have already created Facebook Pages that does not necessarily mean that your business is included in Facebook Places’ mobile check-in feature. Every business should make sure that they have both a Facebook page with complete business info and that they also have a Facebook Places page. Here is some info on Facebook Pages and Facebook Place pages.

Twitter Places. Twitter also has a version of Places. It’s pretty hard to find, but if you send a tweet you have the option of adding your location. If you click the “from <your location>” link below the tweet box, you’ll get a list of nearby points of interest and businesses. You can’t do anything with this data at the moment but Twitter has been reported as testing a “claim” your business feature so I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next six months places become a much more important part of the Twitter experience. For now Twitter is using Localeze as its main business listing data supplier, so be sure to update your info at Localeze. You’ll get the added benefit of having your business info up-to-date everywhere Localeze distributes its data.

Location-based services. Like Facebook and Twitter Places, there are a number of services that provide the ability for mobile users to “check-in.” Foursquare and Gowalla are two of the big names in the space. Each of these services also provides a profile page for businesses on their web sites. The data sets on these location-based services seems to be pretty spotty, so adding and/or updating your business listing on these services can be helpful to getting found on these services as well as generating SEO benefits from their sites (citations, backlinks, etc.).

Get To Know The Local Search Sites You’ve Probably Never Heard of

There are thousands of local directories out there covering every city and most niches. Often times these sites get just as much traffic in a particular local query as the big guys, and they are usually a lot easier to work with. I have found that putting a little effort into some of the larger smaller players can yield some great benefits. And if you have money to spend, they are usually much more approachable about doing customized ad deals. For example, a dentist in Houston could probably buy premium placements on all of these sites combined for less than it costs to run similar ads on just one of the bigger sites. So claim your place page on these sites and see if you can get some extra traffic:

• 7MainStreet
• BOTW Local
• Boulevards
• CitySquares
• GetFave
• HelloMetro
• Intuit’s Business Directory
• Kudzu LocalLife
• MagicYellow
• Mojopages
• OpenList
• ShowMeLocal
• Tupalo
• WhitePages.com Business Search
• Yellowbot
• YellowUSA

There are plenty more of these, but I think the above list likely represents at least 10-20 million monthly local queries.

And since mobile is pretty hot right now I also recommend checking out Avantar. These guys created one of the first yellow pages iPhone apps. According to the Wall Street Journal, Avantar’s app serves over 5 million queries/month. Not too shabby. And since they are not a premium yellow pages/local search brand, I imagine there are a lot of opportunities to work with them to find traffic on their service.

As with all marketing efforts, you should focus on those niches and services that provide the best ROI, but I have found that with local search, fishing where the rest of the fishermen aren’t can pay off.

Below are screens showing the current and new Local UIs. First the existing site and then the new beta site for Local:

Overall the new site is less cluttered and more attractive visually. However it is also “missing” some features that are present today.

The first thing you notice about the new Local UI is that it’s essentially a list, likely inspired by Twitter and/or Facebook’s news feeds. Another significant change is the absence of a map on the Local home page or internal pages. There’s a link to maps on the right, however.

The new Local beta is really about “discovery” rather than search. Yet Yahoo has also apparently removed any category navigation, which means the top tabs are the only way to browse content. And there’s essentially no way to look up specific restaurants or local businesses within the new Yahoo Local.

There’s no local-specific search box here either. Entering a query in the field at the top of the page takes you out of Local to Yahoo Search results. Yahoo seems to have made a decision that it wants to consolidate search results in a single experience rather than offer distinct experiences as it does today.

Currently there’s a dedicated Yahoo Local search experience, as well as local results that appear within Yahoo Search. Below is a screenshot showing a Yahoo Local SERP, for “sushi San Francisco,” and then the same query result displayed in Yahoo Search results:

While it has removed features and content, Yahoo has added some new things to the Local experience that aren’t present in the current version. Top Picks and News are new content areas — and so is Deals.

Deals is a by-product of a new effort by Yahoo to collect and distribute “daily deals” and related offers from multiple sources. While there’s apparently no single deals destination contemplated at the moment — there is a pre-existing deals tab within Yahoo Shopping — it appears Local will be one of several deals distribution points within Yahoo.

In addition, Yahoo is putting a new emphasis on user-generated content (UGC) within Local as part of its newly launched Yahoo Contributor Network. UGC has been present in events since Yahoo’s acquisition of Upcoming in roughly 2006. However the broader integration of locally-oriented articles is new and built on top of Yahoo’s $100 million acquisition of Associated Content earlier this year.

Despite the new emphasis on UGC, reviews appear to be gone from the new Local experience. That raises the question: where will Yahoo source them going forward? Will it rely entirely on third parties? Yahoo was the leader in local reviews content until Yelp came along.

There are now several companies in the local segment, including Google, working on “recommendations” as a way to help people discover new places. This new Local experience puts Yahoo in that camp as well.

Here’s a statement issued by Yahoo about the new Local:

We are piloting a new experience to deliver personalized local content, including hyperlocal news, deals and events to users – offering the best source for what’s happening in their neighborhood and metro area. Currently available in select markets in the US via integration on Yahoo!’s mobile and PC homepages, we are focused on combining an open technology platform with a human touch to keep users informed and drive discovery of great local content.

I’m glad to see Yahoo updating Local. Admittedly this is a limited beta designed to elicit user feedback and it may change quite a bit before more formal rollout. However Yahoo will need to think through the “push” and “pull” scenarios and various use cases involving Local.

Yahoo has done a great deal to improve “discovery” on the site but has made it less useful in several respects as a tool to research places and local businesses proactively. (Again, Yahoo may be transferring that function entirely to search.) I would also recommend a simple mechanism to save or favorite a deal or place and save it for later reference on the go (mobile).

Speaking of which, there’s a smartphone experience coming at some point. However that’s not in evidence at the moment, or I couldn’t find it at least.

Yahoo appears to be totally rethinking the role of “local” within the overall Yahoo site and search experience. The company is taking some bold risks with the new design and content. We’ll see how users respond.

Let me take you through the Sketch-A-Search App which is live today on Yahoo Search. The Sketch-A-Search App lets you draw an outline on a map and confine local results to be within that outline. Ask.com had a similar tool ages ago named Ask City’s Shape Search Tool but since Ask dropped their maps program, the feature died with it.

It all starts with a search with local intent, such as [restaurants 94109]. You should then see quick link under the local results that reads “Sketch-a-search.” Here is a picture:

When you click it, a DHTML box overlays on the screen allowing you to rearrange the map and then draw on it. Here are more pictures:

As a companion to the desktop search app, Yahoo released an iPhone and iPad version on iTunes for free.

For more search apps, see the Yahoo Search Blog.

Yahoo Local Offers

Deals and coupons are a pretty hot item these days in the local space; credit Groupon and others for that. Yahoo announced its horse in the deals race: Yahoo Local Offers. It’s an aggregator that “will make it easy for millions of consumers to find, right on Yahoo!, the best local deals and savings in their area.”

Groupon, in fact, is one of the initial set of partners in Yahoo Local Offers. Others include LivingSocial, Gilt City, Valpak, Coupons.com, and more. Yahoo says Local Offers is currently in a “limited beta” — if you see a tab on the Yahoo home page labeled “Deals For You,” you’re in the test.

Sketch-a-Search Quick App

Previously only available on the iPhone, the Sketch-a-Search “quick app” will be expanded to desktops and the iPad later this week. Sketch-a-Search lets you draw the geographic boundaries of the area you want to search.

Yahoo spoke a lot today about restaurant searches; they say there were more than 35 million such searches on Yahoo last month alone. With that in mind, the new Sketch-a-Search quick app will show reviews of Zagat-rated restaurants, too.

Open Table Quick App

Also coming later this week, and also following the restaurant theme, is a quick app that integrates Open Table’s online reservation system. Users will be able to book restaurant reservations without leaving the Yahoo search results page.

Restaurant Comparison Quick App

To me, the most interesting-looking announcement of all is this one. The Restaurant Comparison quick app basically gathers all the restaurant search results for your query and collects them together in a grid- or chart-like display for easy comparison.

Yahoo says this is currently being tested with a limited number of users. You can see it in action, briefly — along with some of the other local products — in this Yahoo video.

Here’s how Yahoo describes Koprol:

Koprol allows people to connect and share photos, reviews and additional information about locations in real-time using just their mobile phone browser, making the service accessible to a larger percentage of mobile users. Once on Koprol, people can “check-in” to their current location and see where others are and what they are doing. The service helps people find local businesses, such as popular shops or restaurants, based on user ratings including a “thumbs-up” feature to elevate favorite places to the top of the ranking. Users can also start or join discussions based on particular locations and invite friends to participate, creating a unique city-based social mobile community resource.

Given that almost no one in the West knows or uses the site it’s much more of a platform acquisition for Yahoo. It may also be focused on global or developing markets where Foursquare and comparable services don’t have any presence.

One of the Koprol blog posts indicates that the site has begun to work with larger advertisers/brands. Yahoo may have some interesting ideas about how its brand advertisers might utilize the service (a la Foursquare and Bravo) as well.

• Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, integrating Ovi Maps across Yahoo! properties, branded as “powered by Ovi.”
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive, global provider of Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services branded as “Ovi Mail / Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!”
• Nokia and Yahoo! plan to work on ID federation between their services, beginning by making it easy for people to use their Ovi user IDs across select Yahoo! properties to easily access  the online content and services they need.

What does Yahoo get?

It gets reach for mail and messenger into emerging markets where Nokia is very strong. That represents additional potential reach for advertisers.

What does Nokia get?

Nokia gets additional distribution and reach for its Ovi Maps product.

What about search?

Search is not part of the deal. I just spoke with Yahoo and Nokia representatives and I tried to determine why. They didn’t provide anything concrete and kept re-routing me (so to speak) to the major deal terms. I’m speculating that the Yahoo-Microsoft implementation timeline was a deterrent here.

The Yahoo-Nokia products will roll out in the second half and over 2011. I suppose that search could be reconsidered or potentially implemented later, after the full Yahoo-Microsoft integration is complete, but they wouldn’t say anything on that point.

What about ads?

No official remarks on ads, although I did get this statement about it earlier this morning from a Yahoo PR person:

Search is not part of the initial agreement announced today. The two companies will work on future collaborations.  The companies plan to monetize the services in the future.

We can infer from this and what I heard on the phone that advertising is contemplated and the details will be worked out later. Nokia’s Navteq has launched a local ad network and the Yahoo Maps reach is a major potential distribution point for those advertisers.

In addition, any mobile apps that include maps or navigation that Yahoo develops using Ovi Maps would equally provide distribution for location-based advertising hypothetically — for both Yahoo and Nokia.

There is a search angle here. The Nokia executive I spoke with reminded me that location-based content (e.g., POIs) coming from Navteq into Yahoo Maps can also be indexed and presented in general and local search results.

Some are dismissing this deal as “too little too late.” I don’t agree.

For Nokia, this isn’t going to help the company’s competitive hardware position. But this will potentially improve Yahoo Maps and could open the door to Yahoo-branded mobile navigation or other map-based offerings. I think then that Yahoo stands to gain. This could potentially revitalize Yahoo Local to some degree, as well as enabling new LBS Yahoo apps for the mobile market.