Yahoo Go is very polished and easy to navigate through, as far as the different tabs and sections are concerned. It brings you a lot of information and it’s the only one of the client apps that includes photos, although these aren’t always useful for helping you find the place you’re looking for. But there’s no T9 or SureType support so typing is harder than usual and when you choose the common searches there are few sub-categories – so you get all the restaurants in an area rather than getting to pick a cuisine. You can find a specific business quickly, see a rating and call them – but getting directions is almost impossible unless you use Yahoo Go on a phone with a GPS. You might as well stick to OneSearch.

Google Maps assumes you want to do everything from the map, including reading directions and entering information. The amount of information you see on screen can be confusing, especially as it includes the data size of map downloads and whether traffic information is available (almost always not outside the US). Results are usually accurate but the other applications make it simpler to call a business or get directions than Google Maps does. It’s even simpler on the Google Local Search site, but the maps and directions are much more powerful in Google Maps.

None of these apps are a replacement for a good GPS navigation package like CoPilot or TomTom - they’re not safe to use if you’re driving because there’s no voice navigation. That said, Live Search has some of the best directions you can get without having GPS and the combination of the list of turns and the map route works very well. If you do have GPS, it tracks your location so you’ll be at the right place in the directions and if you take a wrong turn you get the chance to get new directions, which is a big advantage.

If Live Search had managed the right results in all our test searches we’d give it an unqualified recommendation. As it is, if you have the choice of all three apps on your device, use Live Search and keep Google Maps as a backup.