Searching for local businesses on Yahoo now brings up a nice interface containing reviews, an overview, photos and driving directions inside a drop down box you can access without leaving the page you're on. It's a smoother user experience than Google or Bing offers and Yahoo may have more local business information than either of those two competitors can offer in-house as well.

The new Yahoo local search presentation is much more informative than what Bing offers and it's more graceful than what Google offers. Even on local searches where Google does have a lot of information, you often have to click over to a Google Maps page to learn more about a particular business. Removing that one pageload makes a big difference in a single user's experience - multiply that by millions and millions of people searching and this little change is a pretty big deal.

Presumably it will be replaced with Bing soon. Bing will no doubt improve, perhaps it will leverage some of what Yahoo! has already, but on face it seems like another loss of innovation and quality user experience due to trouble with monetization.

Great for Cities - But not for Sights

While this worked quite well for the examples Google gives in its blog post, a few of our other searches ('Yosemite National Park' for example), did not bring up any photos. Any search for a city, however, always gave us related images from the photo layer in Google Maps. Searches for local restaurants and sites typically don't bring up any images and searches for local sights already brought up search results from Google Images anyway, and from what we can see, nothing has changed there.

It's nice to see, however, that Google now surfaces more images. It is also worth pointing out that yesterday, Google also announced that users can now easily filter Google Images by Creative Commons license, which, until now, was really the domain of Yahoo's Flickr, which hosts the world's largest repository of CC-licensed images.

Competing With Bing

Of course, we also can't help but think that the fact that Google is facing renewed competition from Bing, which also does a nice job of mixing up images with local search results - though not quite as nicely as Google now does. Travel is one of the areas where Bing excels, and it is good to see that the competition in this market is driving all players to innovate and improve their services.

As usual, RWW Live will be hosted by Sean Ammirati. Our guests are:

• Dennis Crowley from the previously mentioned Four Square (iTunes link). Check out ReadWriteWeb's review of Four Square. Before that, Dennis was co-founder of Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google.
• Tom Coates, from Yahoo! (creator of Fire Eagle). See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Fire Eagle's go-live.
• Mark Josephson CEO at Outside.in. See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Outside.in.

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is now available for listening to here.

These are very welcome changes that really help take advantage of the eye candy that is Street View in Google Maps. There's a whole lot of changes that were made today, all with the long-term fight for map users and their ad-viewing eyeballs in mind we're sure. Today's changes are great, though.

Map search is a heated competition between Google, Microsoft, MapQuest (now with OpenID, by the way) and a handful of other consumer market competitors. That competition goes on in both features like this and in image quality.

Why invest time and resources into making map search interfaces better? Because someday this is expected to be a very commercialized part of search. Once this kind of experience becomes widely available on touch-screen mobile devices, expect to see ads all over and even more innovation come to online mapping.