Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc., fighting Google Inc. for local advertisers, added more city-specific Web pages with information on movies, events and neighborhood restaurants.
Yahoo Local will have a weekend section to help users in cities from San Francisco to New York find things to do, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said yesterday in an e-mail. The site also lets visitors add comments to reviews of businesses such as restaurants and barber shops.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp. are upgrading their sites to take a larger slice of the local advertising market, where companies will almost triple their spending to $2.61 billion by 2011, according to research firm Kelsey Group Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey. As part of the features, Yahoo added new search software to make sponsored links on local pages more relevant to queries made by users.
``It's focusing on the people and the community and is geared to generate more active engagement from those users,'' said Brian Gil, a senior product manager at Yahoo, in an interview.
Google, owner of the world's most-popular search engine, started selling advertising on its maps Web site last year. Both companies are developing software for mobile phones to give users information on nearby businesses and local weather.
Gil, 31, said the upgrade is Yahoo's most significant to the local site in two years. Yahoo Local, released in 2004, also competes with IAC/InterActiveCorp's Citysearch service.
Yahoo shares fell 40 cents to $23.32 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. They have declined 8.7 percent this year. Mountain View, California-based Google fell $11.05 to $497.55. It has gained 8.1 percent this year.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Levy in New York at alevy5@bloomberg.net
