The Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog has just announced that they have added the drag and drop option in order to set your routes to exactly match your purpose; if it's a business trip, it will be the shortest line between point A and point B, if it's an educational one, you'll get to have all the museums or other such sites shown on your map and you'll be sure your kids miss none.

"Following your favorite freeway on Yahoo! Maps is as easy as drag & drop. Once you get your directions to your destination, if you don't quite like what you see, you can pick up your route and drop it somewhere else, and we'll drive you through the area you select in the most efficient manner. If that's still not quite right, you can tug on the route again until it's perfect. Of course you can undo your through-points whenever you like, or go back to your original route. We'll even tell you the difference in mileage and estimated time between your personalized route and our fastest route. This would be great for long trips where you want to see some interesting detours or scenic routes."

It's a great idea and a really useful one, except for the fact that the market has already been dealing with the same option that was implemented quite a long time ago by Google and the users have switched to Google Maps for it. It'll be tough to get the people who have grown accustomed to Google to switch back to Yahoo!, but perhaps they'll manage to do it. I particularly like the window in the lower right corner that allows a comparison to be made between the two routes by time and distance. I'm not sure I'd switch just for that, but I'd most definitely check it out every once in a while.