Yellow Book USA announced a redesigned Yellowbook.com today that features a new clean and simple user interface and a map-based search featuring Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. 

In addition to the enhanced mapping feature, the new site also includes some new navigation tools, such as “predictive” drop-down menus to help consumers refine their search more seamlessly. For example, when I searched for Pizza in Libertyville, Illinois (my hometown here in Flyover Country, USA), the “expand location” drop-down menu suggests “Lake County” as a logic expansion area. Nothing dramatic, but it does make refining the search a little less of a chore. Other drop downs refine by proximity to an address, alpha order and category refinement. 

The new layout places most advertisers above the fold to reduce the amount of scrolling to view results. All in all an improved experience, based on our quick tour. 

The redesign is well timed for Yellow Book, which recently made news by being cited by comScore Networks as one of the fastest growing Internet sites of 2007.