Amazon's A9.com launches Yellow Pages Search with images

Category: Professional.

Amazon's A9.com search engine launches Visual Yellow Pages search.
Amazon's amazing A9 Visual Yellow Pages search.
A Local search engine with images.

- Search locally (Address, City, Zip)
- Find maps
- Get step-by-step driving directions with the distance and time.
- View images
- This is amazing - Take a walk up and down the street
Feels like you're sitting in a cab.

Examples:

- Find Florists in Manhattan, NY
(For all you investment bankers who want to go out on a quick lunch date. Have you ever tried it? Make sure the food is good, served fast, and don't forget to compliment her on her dress when you're presenting the flowers, and throw in a verse or two... The world's sweetness pales in front of you. Always keep smiling. :-))

- Find Starbucks in Mountain View, CA
(A quick halt after a Google interview)

- Find Pubs in Manhattan, NY
(Head straight for a pub on a Friday night)

Say you searched for Pubs in Manhattan, NY and selected the first text link, which provides information about O'lunney's Times Square Pub.

Inside the search results page

- There's an Interactive Map. On selecting the map you can search for and find driving directions from your place (starting address) to the destination. Select the Interactive Map to enter your starting address, and get stepwise driving directions.
- A Block View that provides images of the area, and you can walk up and down the street. Select the < (walk left) and > (walk right) buttons to walk up and down the street.
- Individual images are shown under the Block View.
Select an image to view a larger image.
- Find other businesses along the same street.

Amazon's interactive features (Block View, Take a walk, Images) separates it from Yahoo! and Google's Local Searches. A9.com has great usability and it shows in their local search too. There are zoom in and zoom out features for the images, and each image has a GPS mapping, so you know where you are when viewing an image in the Block View.

Well done, Amazon and A9.com

Related:
- A9.com brings Yellow pages to life by adding 20 million images.
- John Battelle's article, A9.com's 'Walking Photos' in Business2.com
- John Battelle's blog post
- Google news search results for A9 Yellow Pages Search

This post is tagged as Search for Technorati tags.

Cheers
Chirayu