Events are an important but historically neglected area of local search, previously the almost exclusive province of newspapers and printed weeklies. Now there are a range of startups and more established sites providing local events information. They include Socializr, Attendio, Eventful, Zvents, Citysearch, AOL Cityguide, Heyletsgo, Jambase, the various ticket sites and Yahoo’s Upcoming, among others. And this doesn’t include all the online newspaper calendars and entertainment guides.
When Yahoo bought “social events calendar” Upcoming.org more than a year ago, the site was basically three guys, a cool idea and some software, but not lots of data. The events information is entirely provided by the community. And Yahoo! has greatly upgraded and improved the site since the acquisition.
Today the Yahoo Search Blog announced some additional changes and upgrades, including the integration of Flickr and the transition of Upcoming.org onto the Yahoo! Local platform. It’s now at Upcoming.yahoo.com. Geographic coverage has been expanded and local neighborhoods are equally supported.
Yahoo Local has had events for some time but they’re somewhat buried. Yahoo also includes events refinements in general search results. I would expect events to gain more prominence in Yahoo Local and general search results over time as the Upcoming database improves.
Related Topics: Yahoo: Maps & Local
It still suprises me that event sites think they can rely on user submission of events. When will they realize that by definition, search demands comprehensiveness. Dependence on users leaves holes in the quality of the site or skews the database to a specific audience (see: Going.com)
Also, fewer and fewer newspapers have their own events engine. Increasingly they are being run by Zvents (which has a unique advantage as an index crawling the web for comprehensiveness).