Yahoo licenses neighborhood map data

Yahoo has licensed detailed data that describes 40,000 neighborhood boundaries in more than 2,000 U.S. cities, from a company called Urban Mapping.

"Allowing users to search by neighborhood yields more appropriate results, adding value and relevancy to the overall experience," Bob Upham, director of business development for Yahoo's Geo Technologies group, said in a statement.

Urban Mapping's Urbanware database works with a thorny geographic issue, trying to describe informal and often ill-defined neighborhood boundaries.

Meanwhile, Yahoo hopes people will help define neighborhoods through its Flickr photo-sharing service, too.

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Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries is another similarly robust source for neighborhood data and is also used by several major companies in local search as well as offline target marketing.