You may not have known this but the Microsoft Maps experience in the UK was totally different than in the US. The former was based on multiMap, a company Microsoft acquired in 2007. Here’s what the UK experience looks like with multiMap:

Here’s what a Bing Maps version of London looks like:

The Bing version is quite a bit cleaner and more pleasing in my view. Many of the Bing Maps capabilities, such as “Birds Eye” aerial imagery, had been available through multiMap prior to this however.

Now Bing Maps proper will be available in the UK. The Bing Community blog details the changes to the mapping interface and features, including new navigation and mapping layers that can be turned on or off. Many of these improvements parallel recent upgrades made in the US to the Bing Maps interface and features.

A reader pointed us to the Delta 2 rocket launch where Microsoft was a co-sponsor. If you look closely, you can see the Bing logo on the rocket ship.

While Bing’s logo went into space, Google today announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe to launch a satellite into space to provide “high-quality imagery in Google Earth & Google Maps.”

What about Yahoo? Well, they did bury a Time Capsule in earth in October 2006 which wont be opened until March 2, 2020. Not exactly space, but still feels a bit futuristic.

We’re really just at the beginning of the era of “mobile search.” Even what we think of as “search” will be dramatically altered by innovations in mobile. In this first phase the transfer of what might be called the “query box” (and related links) into mobile is complete. In time, however, we many even come to see that image — the white box with the search button to the right — as a kind of metaphor for something more intangible (i.e., directed intent) that can be fulfilled in a variety of ways.

Google is already the dominant player in search on mobile devices and certainly on smartphones, the most active category of mobile users. (It remains to be seen how the Microsoft-Verizon “default” deal will affect the market as it rolls out.) However, recognizing the challenges and limitations of manually keying in queries on mobile devices, the major engines all have voice interface/input options:

• Google (uses its own speech recognition technology)
• Yahoo (uses Vlingo for mobile oneSearch)
• Microsoft (uses Tellme, which it acquired in 2007)

Voice as a search tool will only continue to get better. Tellme recently released survey results that show favorable consumer attitudes toward voice on mobile devices. As the services become more reliable and accurate — they’re already very good — consumers will increasingly use them to retrieve content and information because they’re faster and easier than manually keying in queries.

Another less obvious form of search involves mobile apps on the iPhone and Android, and other smartphone platforms increasingly, which show the closest gas station, ATM or cafe “nearby” using the phone’s built in location awareness capabilities. Yelp and AroundMe on the iPhone are just two examples among a number of apps:

Google itself has an app on Android called Places Directory, which is almost identical and de-emphasizes traditional “search.” But these apps, which don’t actually require any query to be entered, are just as much “search” in terms of the user’s mindset as manually inputting “sushi, new york” in Google.com on a PC.

Another step away from the query box, but still search, is represented by some of the product search tools and services now on smartphones, such as as the Amazon or ShopSavvy apps for Android devices.

These are two examples of a growing trend involving the camera as search tool or input device. They allow you to take a picture using the phone’s camera or use a barcode scanner through the camera to obtain price information, reviews and, in the case of ShopSavvy, where to buy the item locally. The mobile version of Google Product Search (on Android) offers barcode scanning as well. Similarly, use of the camera to capture QR codes to gain additional information can be seen as a kind of search, although it starts to get a bit fuzzy in my expanded definition (”directed intent”) because users may be responding to a call to action and not necessarily actively looking for something.

Yet a further step away from the query box on mobile devices comes in the form of “augmented reality.” Augmented reality apps are starting to pop up on smartphones: Layar, TwitARound and several others are in development. Most recently a company called Acrossair in the UK has developed an augmented reality app for the iPhone. It helps find the nearest underground stop and related information about routing.

As people direct their cameras to find the nearest tube station or, in a future app, to get reviews about a restaurant across the street, they are “searching” for information — albeit by other means. This and some of the other methods described above provide faster, richer or more immediate ways to get information and content than would otherwise be accessed through a traditional query box and related links.

Stepping back, we can start to see how “search” on mobile devices will diversify and broaden beyond the narrow way we tend to think of it today. In this broader world of directed intent that can be fulfilled in a number of ways, depending on the situation and the item or need in question, we move beyond the search box. And if “mobile search” already seems to be locked up by Google, this broader landscape that uses location-awareness, barcode scanners, image recognition and augmented reality is wide open.

As the dust begins to settle on the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, we’re finding that this week’s announcement raised as many questions as it answered. The companies told Danny and Greg that the agreement covers “web, image, and video search.” But what about the many search verticals that Yahoo and Microsoft are involved in? These are areas that, if not technically covered by the “web, image, and video search” label, are certainly highly connected to those products. And they’re likely to feel the impact of Micro-Hoo’s plans in some way, at some point.

One of those verticals is the Local/Maps space. Below are my thoughts on what the Microsoft-Yahoo deal could mean for local search, but first something of a disclaimer: I have no insider knowledge on what will happen, only speculation and even a wish list of what I’d like to see happen. At the same time, I think it might be fair to say that many inside the walls at Microsoft and Yahoo also don’t know what will happen with local and other search verticals. The two companies only referred to having “options” on Wednesday, which suggests that many details are still TBD.

What We Know

As explained on Wednesday, Yahoo’s crawled search results will come from Bing (assuming the deal goes through), but Yahoo will “own the user experience” and can present those search results however it wants on Yahoo search. But, to answer a local search query, search engines rely on a lot more than just crawled search results. They use maps, business listings (their own and from other sources), ratings and reviews (ditto), and more. When Danny and Greg asked about local and mobile, Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider said that Yahoo has an option to use Microsoft technology/products beyond crawled search results, but isn’t required to do so.

Both companies have a variety of local search assets. Among them: Yahoo Maps and a separate Yahoo Local, and there’s also Yahoo Yellow Pages. Likewise, Microsoft has Bing Maps and Bing Local – the latter defaults to a YellowPages.com-powered directory, but eventually brings you back to the same business listings as you’ll find when doing a local search on the main Bing.com search engine.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft also run their own databases for small/local business listings: the Bing Local Listings Center and the Yahoo Local Listings Center. Both companies also offer local search advertising, but if the deal is approved, Microsoft will apparently take over all non-premium advertising, which would seem to include most small/local businesses.

As I see it, there are two local aspects to this deal — the consumer side and the small/local business side. Keeping the above in mind, let’s look at those in more depth.

Consumer Search Impact

On the consumer side of local/maps, Bing and Yahoo have a loooong way to go before they’ll make any noise. According to Hitwise traffic numbers provided specifically to Search Engine Land, the two companies — even when their shares of traffic are combined — are a distant third behind Google Maps and MapQuest.

The chart reflects combined traffic; i.e., Yahoo’s numbers reflect Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Local, and so forth. Add up Yahoo and MSN/Bing properties, and you have about 11% reach … compared to 42%+ for Google. So, in local search, Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s properties are in an even bigger hole than Yahoo Search and Bing are when compared to Google.

Most local search happens not on the specific local and maps properties, but on the main search engines. Yahoo and Bing differ — sometimes substantially — in how they present local search results. Bing is much more consistent in showing a list of local businesses plotted on a map when showing results for an obviously local query, and will typically show up to eight listings.

Yahoo, on the other hand, shows business listings and a map less often. The first two screenshots below show queries like “richland wa real estate” and “seattle restaurants” that are not producing a map with business listings, unlike the Bing screenshots above. When Yahoo does show a map (see third screenshot below), there are typically only 1-3 businesses listed.

Since Yahoo will continue to control its own interface, it’s very plausible that consumers will continue to have different experiences when doing local searches on Bing vs. Yahoo. It seems logical that Yahoo will want to separate its user experience as much as possible from Bing, so improvements like yesterday’s announcement of more business information in local search results should remain in place after the deal.

But with the local results themselves coming from Bing, and with redundancies in other area like maps and business listings, we don’t know what Yahoo local search results will really look like. Does the agreement allow Yahoo to maintain the Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Local products and continue showing them in search results? Would Yahoo want to? Greg wondered earlier this week on his blog if Yahoo should just start using Bing Maps (AKA Microsoft’s Virtual Earth). These are some of the many questions yet to be answered about what local search will look like after the deal is done.

Small/Local Business Impact

As mentioned above, both Yahoo and Bing offer local business listing services for small businesses. The process of creating a listing isn’t much different from Bing to Yahoo, but if I recall correctly, Yahoo’s business center offers a few more data fields to make a business listing/profile more complete.

From my experience, both systems have their strengths. Bing, for example, offers a generally painless method for editing listings. After submitting the changes you want, Bing’s system places an automated phone call at the time of your choice: immediately, or within 5, 15, or 30 minutes. Entering a PIN number is all it takes to confirm the changes you’ve made.

One of the strengths of Yahoo’s local business listings service is the availability of human tech support; it wasn’t long ago that I accidentally uploaded the wrong photo to a client’s Yahoo business listing. While I couldn’t remove it myself (a feature Yahoo should add), I contacted Yahoo and the image was removed for me in less than an hour. Given Google’s poor track record of providing support to local businesses, this is an area of great opportunity for Bing or Yahoo to beat Google in local business listings. But we don’t know if Yahoo and Bing will continue to maintain separate listing services for local businesses, or if that’ll be considered redundant.

The business profile pages offered by both Bing and Yahoo are quite similar. You could argue that there’s not much room for innovation when it comes to presenting basic business profile information, and you might be right.

One area that Yahoo has separated itself a bit from Bing (and Google, for that matter) is in the search advertising products that it offers. Yahoo is the only one of the major search engines to offer fixed price search advertising via its Local Featured Listings service. What makes Yahoo’s LFL service stand out is that mirrors the familiar yellow pages type of advertising that small businesses already know: Placement is guaranteed, and the price is pre-determined — as low as $25/month. The question is, with Bing taking over the non-premium advertising products, what will happen to a small business-friendly ad product like this?

Final Thoughts

It’s anyone’s guess what local search will look like if and when the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is approved. All we know is that Yahoo has committed to showing crawler-based organic results from Bing, and that Yahoo has promised to continue to innovate (their word) on the user experience side of search. In their current incarnations, both Yahoo and Bing have certain strengths in local search. The questions now are whether and how they’ll use those strengths to take on Google (and MapQuest, to a degree), and if it’ll be enough.

MSN and Live Search probably don’t get enough attention in the local search field, but the reality is that there’s a solid core of usage thanks to the default experience offered on many PCs — Windows OS and Internet Explorer. (On a purely anecdotal level, an old blog post I wrote about adding a business to Live Local Search is the 3rd most popular article on my blog in 2009, and MSN/Live sends it the most traffic.)

With that in mind, Live Search’s recent announcement that they’ve overhauled MSN City Guides is worth paying attention to.

The new city guides integrate Live Search and Live Search Maps, which should give greater visibility to local businesses that both rank well in Live Search and score well when reviewed by users. Other new additions to the city guides include video from MSN Video, better localized filtering of events and information, and one-click directions to businesses and other locations.

To a large degree, MSN is playing catch up to sites like Citysearch and Yelp (not to mention MapQuest, Google Maps, and Yahoo Local), but MSN has a large default user base that could help MSN City Guides become a bigger player in the local search field.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: The official Virtual Earth Blog has now posted about this update at their blog.

Microsoft’s innovative Photosynth technology has been integrated into Virtual Earth, marking the first time Photosynth has been available for commercial use.

Photosynth is a tool that lets users upload regular photos and then stitches those photos into 3-D scenes of whatever the photos depict. Our Greg Sterling has previously shown some Photosynth screenshots and called it “pretty amazing stuff.”

Microsoft says that two early customers using Photosynth via its integration with Virtual Earth are NASA and VisitBrighton. Here’s one screenshot of how NASA is using Photosynth to show the International Space Station:

On a more earthly level, in addition to the Brighton Tourism example, you could imagine real estate web sites that already use Virtual Earth for mapping adding the Photosynth technology to show 3-D tours of individual properties. On the Virtual Earth web site, Microsoft also suggests a number of other ways businesses can use Photosynth. You can watch Microsoft’s YouTube video to see all of this in action.

If you’re not a potential business customer, but want to see Photosynth in action, it was integrated into Live Maps late last year. Go virtually to Seattle and look for the Photosynth links in the left content window.

Virtual Earth, which has been somewhat in the shadow of Google Maps and Earth released a large volume of new images for Live Search Maps for a range of countries and cities around the globe.

The imagery allows you to get in very close, so you can see how far your hotel is exactly from the beach in Cannes, for example:

Live Search Maps has not received as much attention as Google Maps but the site has improved greatly over time in terms of usability and accuracy. It’s also much faster than before.

Both Google and Microsoft offer satellite imagery, which is often not that useful to ordinary people in practical situations. Google has StreetView, which can be extremely useful in a range of cases. But Google has nothing between the overhead satellite view and StreetView. Microsoft, despite rumors, doesn’t have a street-level offering (it will over the long term, perhaps through an acquisition) but it does offer a “Birds Eye” view, which as you see in the bottom two images above is much more helpful than satellite imagery.

Since it was introduced more than two years ago, Microsoft’s innovative Photosynth technology has been “under-leveraged.” I’ve written a number of times about Photosynth and its potential. Now, according to an article in Fast Company, Microsoft is going to compete more aggressively with Google StreetView by soliciting user-generated photos and then geotagging and Photosynthing them. The effort is reportedly called “Geosynth”:

Microsoft is going to find its images from someone else, namely, you. Essentially GeoSynth is going to function as a mashup between Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps system and its PhotoSynth technology.

(See clarification below.)

However, GeoSynth has been around since last October. The new implementation would seem to be a stepped up version of what Microsoft has already been doing. Photosynth images are currently available on Live Search Maps:

When Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye photography launched in 2006 it trumped Google Map’s satellite imagery. But the novelty of that faded when StreetView showed up with the promise of an even closer look at buildings and locations in major cities around the world.

When Google was first developing StreetView Microsoft also was testing StreetSide, a comparable offering that showed similar street-level imagery. It never was formally rolled out. Yet Microsoft apparently has continued to collect this imagery using cars with mounted cameras. None of it has shown up on Live Search Maps (as far as I know).

The Fast Company article suggests that Microsoft is now preparing to make Photosynth a more direct competitor with Google’s StreetView. There are some challenges in doing that that revolve around getting good images from people and making the Photosynth integration with Live Search Maps a bit better, but it’s a very provocative idea.

Update and clarification: I just received the following statement from a Microsoft spokesperson:

“Johannes Kebeck’s comments were taken somewhat out of context. GeoSynth is a standalone version of Photosynth offered by Vexcel that is licensed to public sector companies. There are no immediate plans to integrate GeoSynth into the consumer facing version of Live Search Maps.  Photosynth collections are already included in Live Search Maps in the U.S.”

Google has added geo-tagged Panoramio photos to StreetView images. According to the Google LatLong Blog it’s done automatically:

Google’s image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location.

Google has offered images on Maps for some time, but not directly integrated into StreetView like this.

A thumbnail appears in the upper right of the StreetView image (see below). Clicking it opens a new view of the location with a horizontal scrolling bar of images. Users can click any of the images to enlarge. Google is implying it will only use a limited number of high-quality images for any location.

Currently most locations (that I checked) don’t have this feature. If Google were to add Flickr images, however, to StreetView it would instantly be more populated.

Here’s an example where the new user images do exist, for the Paris monument Arc de Triomphe:

This is additional interesting information in Google Maps and will help reinforce Google’s position as the mapping innovator. However, unknown to most people, Microsoft has this same capability too; and in many ways a much more interesting offering in the combination of Photosynth and Live Search Maps.

Here’s the Live Search Maps result for Arc de Triomphe:

Clicking on “explore collections” in the left panel takes you to a range of Photosynth imagery:

You can then explore the individual “collections” (multiple shots of a single location):

In many cases the range and detail of images (including interiors) is terrific:

Photosynth is a really compelling product but the mainstreaming of Photosynth is moving slowly. While it’s integrated into Live Maps, as I mentioned, nobody seems to know about it. In addition, the experience is more awkward and disintegrated (because it requires a special viewer) than what Google has now put together with Panoramio.

The Virtual Earth Blog announced their first 2009 imagery update, including about 100TB of new images.

The major updates include the new Digital Globe satellite imagery they recently licensed and “bird’s eye” photos of Paris, France. There are literally tons of updates to the imagery, from satellite to bird’s eye to orthos. For the full list of where the new imagery can be spotted in Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth, see the blog post.