Yahoo! Sketch-A-Search – An Easier way to Discover Top Restaurants on your iPhone or iPad

The ‘ten blue links’ search experience we’re all so familiar with on our desktops was invented before there were data plans or color screens for connected devices. So naturally, there is a ton of room to innovate around how you can discover information on mobile devices, beyond just ‘porting’ features over from PCs to mobile. That’s why today we’re excited to introduce enhancements to the Yahoo! Sketch-A-Search iPhone app (which you can download here), and the availability of iPad (download here) and desktop versions to help make it easier to discover new restaurants wherever you are.

Just last Friday, our team faced the restaurant picking problem for the nth time – ten minutes before piling into our cars, we started wondering where to go. A frenetic debate ensued in the parking lot, fancying a new place, a new cuisine, or a hot restaurant that no one could remember the name of.

In this kind of situation, there simply isn’t enough time to fire up a laptop or troll through 100’s of user reviews, or to check if a reservation is required. Thankfully, I had our beta version of Sketch-a-Search on my iPhone, and ended up picking the Faultline Brewing Company – a fine place for a large team lunch. We were able to do this by sketching along Lawrence Expressway area, and filtering by cuisine, Zagat ratings, and user reviews.

Our Yahoo! Mobile Search team is looking to solve uniquely on-the-go information discovery problems for you – just like this one.

With our new Sketch-a-Search, we first improved the quality of our data to ensure we’re including the freshest local information possible. We also partnered with Zagat, a leading provider of consumer survey-based information with thousands of restaurant reviews worldwide, so that you can quickly discover the top restaurants in your area. Search results can now be filtered to show only ZAGAT-RATED restaurants, and the reviews from Zagat users are shown alongside reviews from our huge community on Yahoo!. Once you pick a restaurant, you can make a reservation right through the app using OpenTable.

When you have a bit more time to pick your restaurant, try our new iPad Sketch-A-Search app. It is optimized to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen size and landscape mode. The app is also available on the PC as a Quick App in Yahoo! Search – try a restaurant search (e.g. “faultline brewing”) at Yahoo.com to check it out.

You can download both apps today – bon appétit!

Author: Anil Panguluri, Director Yahoo! Search Products