March 11, 2005

Enhancements to Local Search

It's been a little over a week since we launched YSDN, and the response has been terrific. We've received a bunch of suggestions on how to improve our service, and we've read and thought about every single one. We're not planning to rest on our laurels here, and we hope to regularly bring you new services and updates to the existing ones. Your feedback on the mailing lists, in blogs and on the wiki helps us decide which feaures to prioritize.

I'm happy to announce the first of the updates - some minor changes to Local search that you asked for. Starting now, and described in the documentation:

• You can use latitude and longitude as query parameters. Hook those GPS devices into your applications and find things near where you are right now.
• You can sort your results by distance, alphabetically and by rating, along with the default relevance ranking.
• We've bumped up the rate limit on Local search requests to 5,000 per IP per 24 hour period. This brings it in line with the other web services.

We decided not to revise the version number, so the url remains the same. The output is still exactly the same as before and none of the new parameters are required, so all current implementations will continue to work fine with the Local search service. Have fun thinking of new ways to use these features!

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Search Web Services Team

Posted at March 11, 2005 2:26 PM

Comments

Posted by: Mike Jackson at March 18, 2005 7:16 AM

Posted by: badsegue at April 4, 2005 8:05 PM