Yahoo Debuts U.S. Schools Search Tool

Jan 19, 2007 at 1:02pm ET by Chris Sherman

Yahoo Real Estate has introduced a new Schools Search service that lets you search for U.S. schools by city and state or zip code. Results are plotted on a map, and you can sort by school district, distance from a specific location, grade level, or school type (public, private, charter). You can also plot nearby grocery stores, parks, restaurants and gas stations on the map.

Yahoo built the service in partnership with not-for-profit GreatSchools.net. Detail pages for each school include facts such as enrollment numbers, student to teacher ratio, test score data and graphs and so on. Also included are reviews from parents who have had kids attending the school.

I tested the site for my own city (Boulder, Colorado) and found the results to be quite good.

Chris Sherman is Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm. He also programs and co-chairs the Search Marketing Expo - SMX conference series.

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3 COMMENTS ON Yahoo Debuts U.S. Schools Search Tool

gary price, January 22nd, 2007 at 2:15 pm ET:

Chris:

I wanted to point out that local school info (public, private and libraries) has been a part of an Ask.com Smart Answer at the top of web results pages when running a city name search for quite some time.

Example, a search for Costa Mesa, CA.
http://www.ask.com/web?q=costa+mesa&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir

Note the Smart Answer at the top of the web results page and the link for “Schools.”
This link goes directly to the National Center for Education Statistics database.

The NCES page finds public school info, private school info, colleges and public libraries and their data is used many places.

Here’s another example, again look for the link labeled schools.
http://www.ask.com/web?q=suffern+ny&qsrc=1&o=0&l=dir

NCES data is used many places. It’s also possible to go directly to the NCES database directly.
http://nces.ed.gov/globallocator/

Here you can limit your search to various types of schools and also schools/libraries within a specific radius of a Zip Code.

Finally, the always useful collection of free data services at Melissadata.com offers a School District Map Search that outlines a specific school district on a map. Free, registration is required.
http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/mapschool.asp

gary price, January 22nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm ET:

Chris:

Example, a search for Costa Mesa, CA.
http://www.ask.com/web?q=costa+mesa&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir

Note the Smart Answer at the top of the web results page and the link for “Schools.”
This link goes directly to the National Center for Education Statistics database.

The NCES page finds public school info, private school info, colleges and public libraries and their data is used many places.

Here’s another example, again look for the link labeled schools.
http://www.ask.com/web?q=suffern+ny&qsrc=1&o=0&l=dir

NCES data is used many places. It’s also possible to go directly to the NCES database directly.
http://nces.ed.gov/globallocator/

Here you can limit your search to various types of schools and also schools/libraries within a specific radius of a Zip Code.

Douglas Pope, January 22nd, 2007 at 2:19 pm ET:

Earlier this month, HotPads.com launched similar school search functionality that I think is worth checking out. (ie. I am a co-founder) Usere can see all public and private schools, as well as colleges and get relevant information about them at the same time they are viewing available homes.

Oh…and the icons are cuter than Yahoo!’s. :)

Here is our blog post about the launch:

http://daily.hotpads.com/hotpads_daily/2007/01/hotpads_launche.html

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