Google Maps Pulls Away from Yahoo Local: Hitwise report

It’s been a little more than a month since Google pulled more Maps/local content into the regular Google.com SERPs. Has it had any impact on the popularity of Google Maps?

How about a 26% jump in traffic between January and February?

That’s according to LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise, who details a variety of local search stats on the Hitwise blog. LeeAnn’s post is mostly about InsiderPages, Yelp, etc., and how they compare to Google Maps and Yahoo Local. But the most interesting thing to me is the spike in traffic to Google Maps right around the beginning of February, as shown in the upper right corner of this Hitwise chart:

Google and Yahoo were neck-and-neck in local search share when comScore released its data back in September, with Google leading 29.8% to 29.2%. Judging from this Hitwise chart, Google has started pulling away.

[tags]google, yahoo, google maps, yahoo local, local search[/tags]