Bing Launches a Hearty Bunch of New Mapping Features and Tools
Wow, what a day for Bing. Today, at a meeting in San Francisco the company launched a bunch of new features centered around Bing Maps.
This blog post has all the details while Greg Sterling at SEL offers some analysis and images. He also points out that computers will need to have Silverlight installed to make all of the new features work. If you don't have and/or don't want to have it, Bing Maps will still work without all of the new functionality.
At Bing, we dug into this disconnect between search in the virtual space (today’s standard keyword search) and search in the physical space that folks are literally doing every day. We ended up developing something we’re introducing today: a new mapping experience that enables you to elegantly augment the things you’re already doing offline in your real life with an online experience. We like to call this “spatial search”.
A few cool features that I’m most excited about in this new spatial search experience:
The first thing this canvas allows us to do is provide a seamless exploration of your physical world. From outer space to the street outside your favorite coffee shop, the new maps view lets you zoom, pan, and move around with ease.
Our new Streetside imagery [compare to Google's StreetView] features allow you to get down to the street level and walk down the streets to find that good parking lot or figure out exactly where the door to the club is located. Streetside is an excellent example of collaboration with Microsoft Research, Live Labs and the core maps team to build something that isn’t just a bunch of pictures stitched together, but an actual physical environment on top of which we can provide an experience that connects to information from across the web.
+ New Application Gallery
This new platform, which is in limited release today, enables us to provide “mash-ins” on top of this new physical canvas. The applications that we’re shipping today really highlight how information can transform into knowledge when imbued with a spatial dimension. A few of the cool apps we’re shipping include:
++ Twitter: You can now see tweets on the map from their originating location
++ Local Lens: Here we actually index local blogs from around the US and using the clues in the posts, try and place them physically on a map. You can use it to do things like see community happenings in your neighborhood.
++ What’s Nearby: So you’ve found the address of the business meeting you have, but where can you go to sync up your computer before the meeting? With “What’s Nearby” we conduct implicit searches on your behalf to examine the physical canvas and show you types of businesses and services around your final destination.
The Bing Bar
Last, we want to introduce the new “Bing Bar” for Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can think of it as a ‘virtual assistant’ that keeps you informed, keeps you connected, and helps you get things done using search. Go check out the whole bar at http://discoverbing.com/toolbar/ but be sure you don’t miss these great new features:
++ Search Assist – start typing in the search box and see suggested searches, image suggestions, and your search history. Notice also how as soon as you signal to us that you’re going to ‘search’ we expose the search options (like images, videos, etc) in the bar.
++ Browse Plus – sometimes you don’t want to search – you want knowledge and information to come to you. The Bing Bar pulls content from across the web and will even alert you to breaking news when it’s happening. You can also tell the bar to watch things for you – like stocks and sports – and let it handle the searches for you.
++ No-Fail Cash Detector: let the Bing Bar help you save money when shopping online. Do a search on a site like craigslist.org and the Bing Bar conducts a “search” on your behalf, figures out if there are merchants where you can get Bing Cashback on that product, and alerts you by flashing the Cashback icon.
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