Yahoo! Local, which displays businesses through their maps, has added additional editing features which now allows small businesses to update their information quicker, and allows for new additions and deletions. The system also allows customers of said businesses to add information for them.

There is a 24 approval window, so that Yahoo may verify that the information is accurate, and to catch any problems.

For more detailed information on these updates, check out Yahoo’s full blog entry here.

This was discovered over at seomoz.org :

One of the questions I asked at the search engine Q+A on links was “how do the engines feel about pay-per-post services on blogs, where advertisers can buy links and product reviews?” The consensus answer shocked me and probably will shock you, too.

On the panel were:

Tim Converse from Yahoo!
Adam Lasnik from Google
Vivek Pathak from Ask.com
Eytan Seidman from MSN

Tim answered first and said that Yahoo! wouldn’t try to pick one post out of twenty or fifty on every blog that might be running advertorials or paid reviews just to stop link value from that particular post. If the engine looked at the site and saw that in general, the outgoing links were of high quality, there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material. Adam from Google agreed, but said little in particular. Vivek from Ask was quick to note that if the link were off-topic, Ask would be likely not to give that link much weight, but I pointed out that most advertisers would buy links from highly relevant blogs, not just for the search engine value, but because they wanted the qualified, relevant traffic from click-throughs as well as branding. Eytan from MSN agreed but didn’t expand and when Tim Converse from Yahoo! jumped back in to say that it really wasn’t worth an engine’s time to going picking out paid links with that granularity, all the other panelists were vigorously head-nodding and verbally agreeing.

Why am I shocked? Not because I thought SEs really would or could discount pay-per-post on an individual level, but because I’ve never heard that level of straight-forwardness about a near-grey-hat subject like that before. Kudos to all of you - more direct answers like that will continue to earn the respect and admiration of attendees and industry professionals. Consider me impressed (and thankful).

With the news that Google Answers is closing, the Yahoo! Answers Team had this to say on their blog:

Some of you may have already heard, but it was announced yesterday that after 4+ years Google Answers has decided to close its doors to new open questions. While some may choose to celebrate this news, I feel a little differently. We still have a lot of work ahead of us as a product, and continued feedback from the community is helping us make Answers a better place to ask and answer questions.

So what does the Google Answers news mean for Yahoo! Answers? Well for one thing there is now a group of expert askers and answerers looking for a new place to call home, and what better place to turn to than Yahoo! Answers? 

We’d like to extend a warm welcome, so we’ve set up a Yahoo! Group for all of you ex-Google Answerers. Come in, make yourselves at home, and most importantly share your experiences with the rest of us? What worked? What didn’t? We know we have plenty of areas to improve upon in our own community, but what else can we do to make this place the best that it could possibly be?

All the news outlets are buzzing about this. Is Mark Zuckerberg about to become the next obscenely rich internet entrepreneur?

Will this affect Facebook users other than maybe having to deal with more ads?

Will Facebook’s recent privacy issues have an effect on this deal?

Tune in tomorrow¹ and find out.

¹My imaginary lawyers insist that I clarify that tomorrow, in this context, does not necessarily mean tomorrow in the classical sense of the word.

Google plugs phishing hole via ZDNet Technology News

Google News to appeal Belgian copyright decision via The Register

Yahoo! spooks investors with talk of an advertising slowdown via Guardian Unlimited

Google regains ground in U.S. search market via News.com

A Google Trial Ties Ad Position to User Behavior via ClickZ Network

This enterprising fellow has created just what I have been wanting for a while. Google Maps vs. Yahoo! Maps places synchronized map results for both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps side-by-side so you can compare the two.

I’ve been playing with it for a while and am seeing that Yahoo! Maps really lacks in the aerial photography department. I imagine both sites serve up decent, useful maps, but that’s been true for map sites dating way back to when MapQuest was pretty much the only game in town. My comparisons weren’t that extensive, though, so your areas may fare better on either one.

Here is the first example I always use when testing out a new map site. It’s the Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas. It’s just the most ridiculous man-made landmark I can think of that’s clearly visible from above.

Some of you may have tried the rather nifty Google Suggest that auto-completes your search entry based on the most popular searched for queries. If you liked it, you’ll probably be glad to know that this functionality is going to be included by default in the search bar in Firefox 2.0.

Here is a shot of it in action:

Yahoo! also seems to provide suggestions in the beta, but I was unable to find a version of it on their site.

If you can’t wait for Firefox 2.0 to get out of beta to try this, here is an extension that will do mostly the same thing for current versions of the browser. The extension was coded by Google themselves, so hopefully that means it’s stable.