Yahoo Buys Local Search Focused Zofari
News has come out that Zofari have been acquired by Yahoo to bolster their inroads into local search, something that Google is very active in and the company has seemingly fallen behind with in recent years.
Zofari makes recommendations for places to visit in the local area like cafes, restaurants and bars. The service seeks to provide a personalized service where users who like the same kind of places are matched together in order to make more accurate recommendations in the future. This is something that will be familiar to Amazon book buyers who found recommendations of other titles that they may like to be eerily accurate which boosted sales.
The company bills itself as “Local recommendations. Super fast”. This type of service will no doubt be useful to Yahoo when they incorporate the local search results from Zofari into their own search engine results for local-related searches such as “best SF restaurant.”
The Zofari City Guides are popular on the iOS and Android platforms, as well as the web interface.
The Zofari team made an announcement on their site confirming the Yahoo acquisition. They pointed out that they are a small operation and that this deal will allow them to reach a far wider audience in the future.
Yahoo Acquisition Happy
The acquisition is a drop in the ocean for Yahoo who have been busy on the acquisition trail with 40 business purchases over the past two years alone. Display ad sales were down in the last quarter and display ads are not doing as well on mobile search for the company either, so Yahoo is clearly doing what they can to bring technology internally that can benefit their users.
Back in February, the search company penned a deal with Yelp to display their ratings and reviews on their search pages.
Problematic Operational Structure
Difficulties with local search have been exacerbated because of how Yahoo is structured. Each country search i.e. China, the US, the UK, is operated within separate units. As such, it is extremely difficult to implement a local search functionality that would work across all these independent platforms.
Zofari City Guide Apps To Be Discontinued?
It is unknown at the present time whether Zofari City Guides will continue to be available or if the apps will be discontinued as has been a past trend when Yahoo bought a company primarily for its apps and technology base. Mobile users of Zofari will clearly hope that doesn't happen this time.
