Circular Logic
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | --Sean |
Yahoo! Local works on a pretty basic premise -- you want to find stuff that's close to something else. This is pretty easy to understand, but when you actually start retrieving results, the concept gets lost along the way. You see a bunch of little flags clustered together, but there's very rarely a good sense of exactly which parts of the map are warranting consideration.
Their new Search Circle takes away all the guesswork in one interactive, intuitive, and frankly awesome fell swoop. When you expand the floating map next to the your search results, it'll place a circle around the effective search area for your query, letting you know the farthest reaches of your possible results. Not getting enough results? Grab the handle and expand the search radius. Want something a little closer to home? Shrink it back down. Heck, if you know that the street a few blocks over always has some good restaurants, just drag the entire circle down that way.
Seeing this, it almost seems unbearable to specify localized searches any other way, which certainly suggests a job well done.