Yahoo! Placemaker is a geoparsing web service that provides third-party developers the means to geo-enrich content at scale. The service identifies, disambiguates, and 'extracts' places from unstructured and structured textual content: web pages, RSS (and Atom) feeds, news articles, blog posts, ad tiles and creatives, status updates, and similar. It is an open API that assists developers in creating local- and location-aware applications and datasets. Placemaker is not a geocoder, but rather a geo-enrichment service that assists developers in determining the 'whereness' of unstructured and atomic content, making the Internet more location-aware.

Placemaker recognizes place names in plaintext documents and text elements within HTML and XML documents. It also understands geography-rich tags, such as the W3C Basic Geo Vocabulary, and HTML microformats, such as geo and adr (see http://microformats.org/wiki/geo and http://microformats.org/wiki/adr for more information about these microformats).

Current news on this product and others from the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Team is available at http://www.ygeoblog.com; bugs, feedback, questions and comments can be posted at the Placemaker Forum.