The last few months has seen Yahoo grabbing news headlines with a flurry of product re-designs and revamps. The latest – Yahoo Maps. A refreshed Yahoo Maps for the desktop comes to U.S. users. The new Yahoo Maps comes with a slew of new features and more interactivity, but missing an equivalent mobile app so far.

The refreshing new design makes it more consistent with the design tweaks on other Yahoo properties. Key new features include pedestrian and public transit routes. Map users can enter an origin and destination point, and track the route as either a pedestrian, a driver or a public transit passenger. The available public transportation options for the route are included.

Yahoo Maps

The map comes with a selectable satellite view. Yahoo says that it has recently refreshed the maps with clear cloud free satellite imagery for over 14 million square kilometers of land. The maps are further enriched with a layer for real-time traffic, a carousel of stunning Flickr photos related to that location, and local weather. Pan and zoom is bolstered with edge matching and image sampling.

Yahoo says that a quarter of search queries on Yahoo are related to local content. The mapping game is skewed heavily in favor of Google Maps, so it will be interesting to see how Yahoo compares. The edge will go to the company with more rich data. Google has the lead. Will Yahoo be content with playing second fiddle?

Source: Yahoo Blog [Broken URL Removed]