This morning, while driving to work, I heard a radio commercial for Yahoo! Local. They simply said, go to Yahoo and click on the local link. Unfortunately, it took me several seconds to scan the Yahoo home page to locate the Local link, buried with the other links. Local has been in "beta" for around two months, and they have officially released local to the public. I thought beta was just a reason to not field complaints about the issues with the SERPs when conducting a search.
Obviously, Yahoo and the industry find local to be a major area in search engine development. Many smart SEMs have been targeting local, their own ways, for years now. Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch, also Chris Sherman blogged about it, which was then picked up by John Battelle.
