Yahoo has integrated Yahoo Auctions with Yahoo Maps, it announced to users on Sunday. When visitors to Yahoo Auctions use the "Near Me" feature to locate items within a certain distance of their zip code, the search results will include a "View Map" link. Clicking on View Map brings up a page containing a Yahoo Map with a red balloon indicating the location of the item.

Auction sites have rolled out features like Yahoo Auctions "Near Me" and eBay's "Items near me" and "sort by distance" to help buyers find items close to them. This can be especially useful in certain categories where items may be hard to ship, and where auction sites are competing with online classifieds sites and search engines like Craigslist, LiveDeal and Oodle, as well as newspaper classifieds.

The maps feature may raise concerns among sellers, however, as an item's location is in most cases the same address as the seller, many of whom operate home-based businesses. In 2004 when eBay rolled out a distance-search feature that allowed shoppers to see an item's zip code location, some sellers objected fearing a loss of privacy, particularly in small towns with low populations (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m12/i20/s02).

http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/announcements.html