Yahoo! Local Gets Overhaul and dumps down local business reviews

Yahoo! Local has been known and used as a local business review site, just the same way Yelp, Yellowpages are. However, the quality of reviews has been pretty bad. For example, this Boulder locksmiths has been gather over 450 spam business reviews which represents about 1% of the population in Boulder.

In this front, Yelp and others have shown to be more mature than Yahoo. In this Yahoo! Local announcement, they have changed their direction more into content delivery and local deal site. It can gather deals from living social or Groupon on latest deals, it also delivers contents about events happening in the neighborhood.

as noted in the post

There is a unique intersection between the content users find useful and what marketers want to advertise – especially in a local experience – and we recognize that. With the new Yahoo! Local we are fundamentally changing how users will interact with local content, including advertising. As we build out the experience, we’re exploring and experimenting with various advertising solutions that will enable our advertising partners to reach their target users.

Yahoo! Local is changing course from a pure play local business review tool with lots of spam reviews, into a more financial promising tool between users and merchants.

In my opinion it is a good move for an Unsuccessful or 2nd tier Local Business Reviews, and complaints site. Having the tool to change direction and downplays the problematic review resources, Yahoo can use the resources to focus on building a network on users and merchant. It is a tough job because local is highly customized and it is never enough customization, and it can never be accurate. But with the recent layoffs of Yahoo, I hope Yahoo can finally provide something that I may use, or useful to the general public.