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Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search App Brings Drawing to Restaurant Search

by Terrence O'Brien on March 24, 2010 at 07:20 AM

Yahoo! Wants You To Draw Your SearchYahoo!'s recently launched Sketch-a-Search is one of the most interesting apps we've seen in a while for the iPhone. The app lets you search for local restaurants by drawing a circle (or triangle, square or trapezoid) with your finger around the area in which you're trying to find a place to eat.

The app gathers your GPS coordinates on launch, and then you tap the "sketch" button in the middle to get started. Simply draw a shape around the area where you want find a restaurant, and from there, you can filter out results based on rating, atmosphere (such as "romantic" or "family friendly"), and cuisine.

In our brief hands-on, the app worked well enough, though the drawing was a little buggy at times (it sometimes lagged and didn't always follow our finger perfectly). Additionally, the filtering was limited by the lack of users applying tags for both atmosphere and cuisine in our trial neighborhood, West Brighton (on the north shore of Staten Island). Check out a quick hands on video after the break.

Yahoo! plans to expand the search tool to other businesses and locales, but for now it's limited to U.S. based eateries. Though Sketch-a-Search is a novel tool, it's hard to imagine it garnering heavy usage with Yelp's current dominance of the location-based food search marketplace. [From: techland]

Tags: hands on, HandsOn, iphone app, IphoneApp, restaurant, restaurants, search, sketch-a-search, yahoo, yahoo sketch-a-search, YahooSketch-a-search

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