Yahoo! has acquired UK geolocation company Whereonearth to help improve its local search and mobile phone services.

See my other article on local search and its importance, estimates cite the number of searches containing or pertaining to a location to be anywhere up to 30%. Currently though the services offered by the search engines to help advertisers tap into local searches are extremely limited so hopefully Yahoo! can do something good with its new database. Geolocation services are also expected to play a major role in mobile phone searches, delivering results that are close to the user IE. matching a locally targeted Overture ad to location data provided by a company such as Cambridge Positioning Systems .

Whereonearth's database covers more than 90 percent of Europe, Asia and the Americas. "Having that geographic data asset is something that's becoming critical for us to make the user experience relevant, as well as the advertiser experience more useful," said Bassel Ojjeh, Yahoo's vice president for strategic data solutions.