While Yahoo’s stock languishes in territory that must make Jerry Yang want to toss his cookies, they are still coming up with new and useful little tricks that will help bring in new traffic to their lagging search engine.

As Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land reports today, one of them was just launched. Yahoo’s cheap gas shortcut works like this: simply search for gas price(s) + city/zip code, or cheap gas + city/zip code, and Yahoo will send you to a shortcut that shows the lowest gas prices for the city you inquired about, along with a map showing pushpins of the location.

Since I’m going to Torrance, CA tonight and I need a fill-up, I’ve just found that the least expensive gas in town is $3.33 a gallon in a few different places. Unfortunately, users are unable to zoom in on the map provided by Yahoo. They could do better.

Google and Live Search don’t have this functionality right now, so Yahoo has a leg up in one arena. Of course, with gas prices much lower than they were a few months ago, fewer people are likely to be concerned with driving all over town to save a few cents.

Yahoo is getting their statistics courtesy of gasbuddy.com, and Gasbuddy gets a nice ad out of every use of the service, as well as a redirect to one of their many sites if you click “more gas prices” or the title line.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 4:27 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.