Search Engine Land » Microsoft: Photosynth

WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:26:11 +0000

The Wall Street Journal is out with a story saying that Google is about to make one of the biggest changes in its history of offering web search, providing more direct answers and gaining “semantic” smarts to understand more about what words mean. I’m scratching my head, since Google already does this. Methinks Google’s PR has exploded in ways it didn’t expect.

Beyond Blue Links!

From the story, we learn things such as:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

and:

The company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.

and:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

Be sure to read the full article. I don’t want to be doing too many extended quotes out of it. But having read it several times myself, I keep trying to understand what’s new here.

Google’s Existing Semantic Search & Direct Answers

Google’s arguably been doing semantic search since 2003, when it began searching for synonyms of the words actually entered. It has increased its understanding of the meaning of words over the years and even did a detailed blog post about this in 2010. Here’s another from 2009:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

As for “spitting out” those “facts and direct answers” that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began.

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack from 2009 covers how direct answers were provided in response to a variety of searches, and many of these answers were already integrated into Google for years before that was written.

UPS & FedEx tracking reports, along with flight status updates, a built-in calculator and more. Had it in 2004. Movie information and stock charts? 2005. Music and weather? 2006. Sports scores? 2009.

Here’s Google blogging about “Just the facts, fast” in 2005:

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A.

We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device).

Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

Google Squared Still Lives

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010. See here on the Google blog and our own stories:

By the way, Google even was offering facts like the sexual orientation of celebrities, though this was dropped last year.

Honestly, it sounds like Google is just going to ramp up showing results that come from its Google Squared technology, as well as what’s been built since its Freebase / Metaweb acquistion. The WSJ mentions the latter, but not Google Squared:

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities….

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Squared was closed as a stand-alone service last year, but the technology has remained a part of Google search. These articles explain more about it:

Why If There’s PR Smoke, There Might Be No Fire

If all this isn’t really new, why’s it getting played up so big with the Wall Street Journal, as well as Mashable last month? Mashable even quoted Google talking about its “knowledge graph” for the first time that I’ve seen.

My take is that Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown up out of proportion to what will really happen.

Google’s been under intense pressure in some quarters since rolling out Search Plus Your World, pressure that its results aren’t as good as in the past. It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies. Heck, it’s right out of Bing’s playbook.

Remember Bing & Powerset?

If you believed all the forward-looking stuff that Bing has pushed, you’d have expected Google to have been a whimpering child of a search engine cowering in the corner, at this point.

Why remember Powerset, with all that amazing semantic technology that Bing later acquired? Here, read up on it:

Sure, Powerset is part of Bing. Did you notice it making Bing significantly better than Google? Has Bing drawn tons more people over to it from Google for having that technology?

Nope. But that doesn’t stop Bing from talking it up, though it seems to have done less of that lately. Powerset is good technology to have. It might lead to important future improvements. But no instant revolution is about to pour forth from it, nor has it.

Remember Bing & Wolfram Alpha?

Heck, remember when Wolfram Alpha partnered up with Bing? This was after Wolfram Alpha’s factually-based search engine failed to wipe Google off the map, as some assumed it would. Here are some reminders of that:

For all that the direct answers were supposed to be important, I can’t even get Bing to trigger some of the examples it touted when linking up with Wolfram Alpha.

Make no mistake. Wolfram Alpha is a cool, useful search engine. In fact, I had a long, excellent conversation with Stephen Wolfram on Monday while at the SXSW conference about how things are going and some interesting things to come. Stay tuned.

But it’s important to distinguish between what’s put out as PR versus what’s likely to happen in reality. Bing’s done a lot of big talk, and when that big talk has done nothing to stall Google’s market share, it still keeps talking big. This past piece from me explains more about that:

Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan

Why’s Google Talking Big?

Google’s doing some big talk of its own now, which as I said, is probably being interpreted as even bigger than it really is. But why this specific talk about direct answers and understanding?

For one, Google shot itself in the foot last year. At the D Conference, WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg pointed out to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt that Google didn’t do as good as job as Bing in providing direct answers. And Schmidt agreed! From my coverage then:

Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It was crazy. Mossberg wasn’t right. What the hell is “some” cases supposed to mean. In “some” other cases, Google has more. But overall, no one has any idea who provides more direct answers, much less meaningful direct answers. No one. Mossberg didn’t inventory this himself. There’s no third-party survey out there. It’s not like there’s some “direct answers app store” listing answers that you can count.

That was just Mossberg, in my view, saying what he believed in his gut. It was Schmidt, to me, kind of cowering against Mossberg. He is, after all, Walt Mossberg. You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. Even if he is.

As a result, Google positioned itself as being weak to the leading tech journalist on the planet. How do you pull yourself out of that?

The Siri Problem

I know! Maybe you start talking about all those direct answers you’re going to do? Make sure you do that fairly quickly, because you’ve got another problem brewing.

While your latest Android 4 mobile operating system has arguably made it harder for people to search by voice — and while most Android phones still haven’t been upgraded to it — those iPhone 4S phones all equipped with Siri sold like hotcakes.

What’s Siri doing? Sending some of the searches people do not to you (as you’d think that deal you have with Apple would require) but instead over to Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

You know, like 25 percent of the voice searches people are doing with Siri. That’s a lot of searches.

The press noticed that. They also noticed when Apple distanced itself from Google Maps in the latest version of iOS. You even had a financial analyst trying to figure if the end of a Google-Apple deal would harm Google’s bottom line. That got press attention, too.

If you’re Google looking at all this, it becomes even more important to start talking about how you have this Wolfram Alpha-like fact engine that you’re churning up. Heck, you even rolled out a Wolfram Alpha-like graphical math calculator last year.

What To Expect

To sum up, Google’s already said several times over the past year or so that it would be providing more and more direct answers. It sounds like that’s the biggest thing that’s likely to be released in the coming months.

Those direct answers potentially take traffic away from a relatively small set of sites that try to serve up direct answers, such as the height of Mount McKinley. That’s sad for those sites, but it’s good for the searcher. And it shouldn’t impact the much larger set of sites out there with broader information.

Indeed, you can already see this now:

You can see the direct answer at the top. The three arrows from that area show how some of the sources also get surfaced as regular results. Below that, the fourth arrow highlights how another site appears.

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

There have also been reports that Google’s working on a better version of Google Voice Actions, a version that’s more assistant-like, in the way Siri is. It might even get called Majel. That sounds reasonable, especially given how long various Googlers have talked about wanting to have a Star Trek-like computer (as voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).

But in the end, for all that the search engines have talked for years about going beyond “10 blue links,” I’d be surprised if the changes the WSJ story today talks about dramatically alter what we see now on Google. More answers, sure. But those 10 blue links will still likely remain the core of what’s shown.

For Google’s part, when I emailed for any comment, it replied with: ”We have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

I’ll be following up to see if I can pry anything more on-the-record about this.

Postscript: Google’s Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search efforts and who was cited in the WSJ story, has posted to Google+ to say:

Some recent news coverage about Google has sparked interest in where we are and where we’re headed in search.

Let me just say that every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible. In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.

In 2010, we acquired Freebase, an open-source knowledge graph, and in the time since we’ve grown it from 12 million interconnected entities and attributes to over 200 million. Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight.

But as I explained in an interview last month [ED note: the Mashable interview I mentioned above], our initial steps towards this virtuous cycle are indeed baby steps. So stay tuned for updates on what will continue to be a long road ahead.

The last part is key in all this: “the long road ahead.” I think that underscores the point of what I’ve written, that you’re unlikely to see a massive change to how Google search looks and operates in the near term.

Microsoft’s Photosynth App Goes Worldwide After 6 Million US Downloads

Matt McGee — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:59:15 +0000

Microsoft’s Photosynth iOS app, which has been available to US users for almost a year, is now available worldwide and includes a couple updates.

In its blog post today, Microsoft says the app has passed six million downloads since its US-only launch last April.

The app is now in version 1.1.3 and is available to iOS users around the world. It includes performance tweaks specifically for iOS5 users and adds Twitter sharing, too. Previously, photo panoramas could be shared on Bing Maps and Facebook.

If you’re not familiar with Photosynth, it’s an underrated product that makes it almost brain-dead simple to create photo panoramas without any additional stitching/editing required. The app itself does all the work and the user chooses where the upload/share the final panorama.

The search marketing angle to this is pretty simple: It’s like a do-it-yourself store photo tool for Bing Maps. A local business owner could use Photosynth to create a panorama inside his/her facility, then upload it to Bing Maps. If the imagery is tagged with the name of the location, it’ll show up on the business listing — see the Museum of Flight in Seattle on Bing Maps for an example.

Google Maps Vs. Bing Maps: Summer Vacation Planning Showdown

Matt McGee — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:00:37 +0000

Wouldn’t it be great if there was one mapping service that offers everything you need to plan a trip to somewhere you’ve never been?

Sure, map sites are generally pretty similar. You can see maps, find business listings, get driving directions, see images and stuff like that. But it’s actually more complicated than that.

At least it was for me.

My wife and I recently visited Maui, Hawaii for the first time. We spent a week on the island celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary and, after getting advice from all of our family and friends, we had enough must-sees and must-dos to fill a month there.

After we decided how we wanted to spend our week, my job was to plan/map it out. It soon became a study in the differences between Google Maps and Bing Maps – the two sites I relied on most heavily. (A third mapping service was helpful once we were on the island.) Here’s a look at the strengths and weaknesses of two major mapping services — a summer vacation showdown, if you will.

Basic Mapping: Google Maps vs. Bing Maps

As much as I love some of the cool stuff that Bing Maps offers, I’m usually a Google Maps user. And there’s one main reason for that: When it comes to basic mapping, the most fundamental piece of the puzzle, Google’s maps are much more readable and usable than Bing’s. Consider these two screenshots showing Kahului, the area immediately around Maui’s main airport.

Google Maps: Kahului, HI

Bing Maps: Kahului, HI

To my eyes, the Google map is more visually attractive and, therefore, much easier to read and use. The wording and labels stand out more, main roads and minor roads are delineated more clearly and colors are used more effectively to indicate things like the airport and various malls/shopping centers.

Justin O’Beirne, who writes the excellent 41latitude.com blog about mapping technology, drew the same conclusion during a series of posts comparing Google, Bing and Yahoo maps:

Google’s labels seem to “pop” much more than the other sites’ labels. Major cities also seem to stand out much more. And whenever you’re quickly scanning the maps, the label you’re searching for seems to stand out just a little sooner on Google’s maps.

For my vacation planning purposes, the winner on this point is clear.

Winner, Basic Mapping: Google

Business Listings & Directions

For our week-long trip, we needed a lot of access to local business information. Even though we did plenty of advance research choosing some places, we still needed to find local restaurants, places to shop for gifts to bring home, places to find snorkeling gear and so forth.

We used both desktop and mobile devices for these searches and, for the most part, both Google and Bing provided very good local business results and directions to get there. There was one notable exception: On a search for “lahaina restaurants,” Bing inexcusably showed us results that covered the entire western coast of Maui, while Google nailed the targeting right into Lahaina’s not-so-big footprint.

Bing Maps: “lahaina restaurants”

Google Maps: “lahaina restaurants”

At the end of our trip, a third mapping service came into play for a separate business-related search. We needed to find a gas station near the airport before we returned our rental car. This was a mobile search, so I fired up the MapQuest iPhone app because it has several presets for different types of businesses — including gas stations. A search for “ogg” (the airport code) combined with the gas stations preset button led us exactly where we needed to go.

Yes, it’s true that the Yelp and Google Places iPhone apps also have “gas station” presets, but there’s a difference: Those apps default to your current location and it’s impossible to use the presets to search a different area. (Well, it’s not impossible, but it’s a hassle to have to turn off location awareness first, especially when the whole point behind the apps is to search for things near you.) It’s also true that a desktop search on Google Maps for “gas stations near ogg” would’ve produced equally good results (a desktop search on Bing isn’t nearly as good for that phrase), but this was a specific mobile search scenario, we were on the other side of the island, and I knew that MapQuest’s app offered me the quickest access to what I wanted to find.

Winner, Business Listings and Directories: none (Google and MapQuest tied)

Imagery

Bing has invested a lot of time and money into the imagery aspects of Bing Maps, and it really showed during our trip planning. Since we were going to an unfamiliar place and planning several unfamiliar drives/adventures, I wanted to visualize what we were doing as much as possible.

For example, one friend gave us a tip about a great place to snorkel that’s not crowded and is filled with fish and sea turtles. It’s a small bay where the Honokeana Cove condominiums sit, but you don’t have to be renting there to use the small beach and get in the water. This isn’t the kind of tip you find in the Maui guidebooks, so in addition to finding where it is and how to get there, I wanted to see this place online first so I could be sure that we later found the right place.

Both Google and Bing took me right to the condominiums when I searched for “honokeana cove.” But Bing separated itself dramatically when I started looking at imagery.

With Google, I was limited to the standard, overhead satellite image. It was somewhat helpful to give me a sense of what I should see when we visited, but as with much satellite imagery, it gets blurrier the more you zoom in and doesn’t offer a very detailed view.

Google Earth wasn’t any better.

But this is where Bing shined. As I zoomed in, Bing Maps automatically shifted me from map view — not to the overhead satellite image, but to its 45-degree imagery. And unlike satellite images, the closer I zoomed in, the more detail I saw about parking, the walking path, and so much more. I could also spin around to see the area from different angles, like this:

Bing’s 45-degree aerial images have been around a long time — Microsoft partnered with Pictometry for those images way back in 2005. Google only added 45-degree images to Google Maps last summer, and the feature is still only available in limited cities around the world (listed on this official list/map that Google maintains).

One more thing: While looking at these 45-degree angle images, I decided to click into Bing’s “Map Apps” collection and found a Photosynth set of images uploaded by a user. I’ll spare you all 24 photos and just show one screenshot:

The Photosynth imagery was another helpful feature that let me see my search results much more robustly than Google’s overhead satellite images.

That’s not to say Bing was the only source of helpful images. In fact, while Bing has been pouring its energy into aerial images, Google has been focusing on ground images in recent years via its Google Street View service.

Street View proved helpful as we were planning to drive Maui’s famous “Road to Hana.” We used an excellent book called Maui Revealed that points out dozens of diversions like waterfalls, ponds and other places where you can stop to enjoy amazing scenery. But finding some of these spots is difficult; they’re sometimes as specific as “park your car XX feet after the guard rail and look for a path in the woods.”

For example, the instructions to find one waterfall that we wanted to see are as follows:

At 8/10 mile past the 10-mile marker on the ocean side of the road is a turnout with a telephone pole. There’s a well-worn path to the right.

Seriously??!! Well, that sounded pretty daunting until I fired up Google Street View, poked along the highway step-by-step and eventually found this:

That’s the spot we wanted, and finding it on Street View made me a lot more confident that we’d find it while driving, too. Google helped out like this with a couple different diversions we wanted to explore, which was cool. What wasn’t cool is that there are substantial sections of the Road to Hana where Street View isn’t available.

What’s interesting to consider is the two different approaches Google and Microsoft have taken to map-related imagery. Google’s focus has been on Street View, while aerial imagery is lagging behind and seems like a secondary project. MSFT/Bing has taken the opposite approach, with a heavy emphasis on aerial imagery, while only recently making public plans to expand its Streetside ground photo service.

In any case, because Street View came up a bit short, and because Bing’s 45-degree aerial imagery and Photosynth are much better than what Google offers, the choice here goes to the underdog.

Winner, Imagery: Bing

Final Thoughts

If there was a point system attached to these categories, Google would probably get a slight win over Bing based on its performance in basic mapping as well as business listings/directions. But Bing’s emphasis on aerial imagery was extremely helpful with vacation planning, and MapQuest’s search presets also got us the local info we were looking for right when we needed it.

In other words, there’s no obvious winner in this maps showdown.

If anything, this proves that there are pretty substantial differences still between some of the major mapping/search services. Depending on your situation (what you’re looking for, whether you’re on the desktop or mobile), you might find better information and results by switching from your favorite map site to something else. It’s not convenient, but it’s the current state of search and mapping services.

It leaves me wondering: Will we ever have one mapping service to rule them all?

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

Bing’s Read/Write World: An Ambitious Project To Bridge Maps With Movies, Photos, Local Data & More

Matt McGee — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:31:23 +0000

It’s probably not something that you can wrap your head around pretty quickly. It’s also not something you can describe in quick, easily digestible terms.

“It” is a new Microsoft Bing effort called Read/Write World that has some pretty lofty goals: things like indexing and connecting all of the world’s “geo-linked media.” And not just indexing and connecting all this media, but also making it easy to use and consume, too, on any platform and type of device.

It’s stuff like maps, photos, panoramas, movies, business listings — almost anything that can be tied to a physical location — and tying it together inside a pretty box that’s easy to open. The clichéd explanation would be this: It’s like your favorite mapping service on steroids.

This three-minute video gives a good idea of what it might look like, with its combination of mapping, Streetside photos, Photosynth panoramas, interior business videos and such.

Untitled from Read/Write World on Vimeo.

There’s obviously a technical element involved in making all this happen, and Microsoft has created a new programming language called RML — Reality Markup Language — to describe the geographic relationships between different pieces of media. And just in case I’ve oversimplified all of this so far, here’s how Microsoft itself describes the project:

The goals of a Read/Write World viewer are ambitious. Our prototype shows the importance of being able to combine nadir, oblique, and “human scale” map imagery with photos (flat or multi-resolution), panoramas (equirectangular, cylindrical, cubemapped, …) video in different formats, models (locally or globally textured), and annotations. In order to span and connect these diverse representations, we’ve invented a little glue language that we modestly call “Reality Markup Language” (RML).

It sounds a bit heavy on the programming/dev side of things, but the Bing blog post also mentions things that sound like they’ll be geared toward us regular folks, like

Being able to simply create immersive experiences from your own and others’ photos, videos, panoramas, and models
“Fixing” the world, when the official imagery of your street is out of date.
Visually mapping your business, your rental apartment, or your local strip mall, and allowing everyone to explore it.

There’s no question that the idea behind Read/Write World is ambitious and, if you watched the video above, you probably saw the potential for something pretty cool. But making this something that both developers and laypeople can contribute to would be quite an accomplishment.

Microsoft’s Photosynth Gets Its Own iOS App

Matt McGee — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:58:58 +0000

Photosynth is one of the many cool-but-underpromoted-and-unknown aspects of the Bing Maps experience. That could change soon thanks to the launch this week of a Photosynth app for iOS devices.

With the Photosynth app, users can create panoramic images inside the app — no additional stitching software required — and upload them directly into Bing Maps. (Or to Facebook if you prefer.) It looks better than I’m describing it, so watch at about the :20 mark of this Microsoft video to see how the app works.

If users upload panoramas to Bing Maps and tag them with the name of the location (a museum, stadium, store, etc.), the photosynth panorama will show up alongside the business/location’s listing.

It can be a compelling way to introduce a location to potential visitors. Consider this screenshot below of a Photosynth panorama of a snorkeling spot on Maui. The images are hosted on Photosynth.net, but I discovered the panorama via a link in Bing Maps while planning for a trip there later this year.

The Photosynth app is currently available for Apple devices running iOS 4.1 or later, and a Windows Phone version is in the works, too.

Bing Releases Huge Set of Upgrades: Maps, Local, Mobile, Travel, Image Search

Greg Sterling — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:19:58 +0000

At the Bing Search event in San Francisco today, Microsoft unveiled a dizzying array of nearly across-the-board updates and improvements for Bing online and mobile apps. Some are minor and some are more significant. Most of these upgrades and feature enhancements will be available starting today or later this month.

There are in fact so many things rolling out simultaneously that it’s a bit overwhelming. Accordingly in this post I’m just going to offer up an edited version of the information provided by Microsoft. We’ll explore selected features and products later in subsequent posts.

Facebook-related:

Like Annotations: Search results will now show which links on the main results page have been “liked” by a person’s Facebook friends.
Social annotations: Bing is bringing “like” data into core search across all queries. Search results will now show which links on the search engine results page have been “liked” by a person’s Facebook friends. This feature will show what a person’s friends “liked” on the main results page and will be different for each user.

Local enhancements:

OpenTable will be integrated into the local search vertical, allowing people to book reservations from the restaurant details page in Bing.
FanSnap will be integrated into the local search vertical, allowing people to purchase tickets to a concert or sporting event through the events details page in Bing.
Everyscape integration: Interior Views on business profile pages will allow people to see inside local restaurants and businesses with 360-degree panoramic views. These views will be accessible from the local search results. This feature will initially be available in Seattle, San Francisco and Boston.

Bing Maps:

Bing Maps will feature stronger differentiation and contrast between major and minor city streets so streets “pop” out more
Venue maps provide detailed maps and directories of venues, such as shopping malls, airports, museums and college campuses, within Bing Maps.
Improved Landmark Listings: Users now get contact information, related businesses, and landmark details immediately from the search for a landmark.
Transit Routing: Transit directions will be available for the AJAX experience. Users can choose their desired departure time and choose among multiple routes with similar travel time. The initial cities in the release are: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Newark Metro Area, New York Metro Area, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver BC, and Washington DC.
Map Interface: The new Bing.com/Maps experience allows rich features to be more accessible by all users. In this release, the Map Apps button and Gallery can be viewed in the Bing.com/Maps (AJAX) site – once a Map App is opened, users without Silverlight will be shown how to download Silverlight to access Map Apps.
Map App Search: Adds a search box to find map apps within the app gallery.
The left-rail of the AJAX site will now guide users to some of Bing Maps’ key features – directions, traffic, business lookup, and map apps – and helps map apps to be more discoverable within the core experience.

Mobile (iPhone):

Autosuggest: Bing intelligently narrows and refines restaurant and movie searches by suggesting query strings to help people plan the perfect night out.
Bing Vision: Bring an object into the [camera] viewfinder, hold it still and Bing will detect text and present a highlighter tool to select words for a search. If the object has a barcode, Bing will instantly return product results. Search for a nearby business listing by pointing your camera at a landmark.
Check-in: Share your current location with friends and family via Facebook, foursquare or Windows Live Activity Stream.
iPhone Apps: Surfaces iPhone apps in search results, when relevant.
Plans: From the Bing homepage or a local search result, people can plan a night out and share the plan with friends via Facebook, who can comment or join the plan.
Opentable and Grubhub integration: With the integration of Opentable and Grubhub into Bing for Mobile, once you find your restaurant of choice, you can reserve a table on OpenTable or order takeout from Grubhub without leaving the Bing app.
Real-Time Transit Predictions: Real-time updates for Boston, San Francisco and Seattle allow commuters to see if transit options are on schedule, early or delayed, with predictions for arrival times.
Reminders: Create a “to-do” list and set reminders to receive alerts when near a specific location.
Enhanced StreetSide: Helps people orient themselves in unfamiliar places by stitching together and panning across street-level imagery of businesses, addresses or landmarks.

Mobile (Android):

Search Widget: expands beyond the ability to search contacts, apps, audio files or the Web and includes ability to search third party apps that register to be searchable.
Share Command: Share content with friends using any loaded app that can accept and share content (images, URLs, etc.).
Opentable and Grubhub integration: With the integration of Opentable and Grubhub into Bing for Mobile, you can reserve a table on OpenTable or order takeout from Grubhub without leaving the Bing app.

Travel:

Flight Summary: Displays an instant set of airfares as users enter flight details such as cities and dates. This provides people with an approximate cost for their trip without having to complete a full search, and allows people to see alternative travel options that could help save money or provide a better value.
Flight Answers: Flight search options have expanded to include Flight Answers, which utilize flight search and top deals. Users can type “I want to fly to Paris next January” and find a form pre-filled with January dates, or try “fly SEA to SFO on Dec 9 returning Dec 12” to find precise flight information. Users can also construct queries around one-way, non-stop and airline-specific requests.
Destination Pages: Bing’s new destination pages pull together all the key information on a city, saving you time and energy: flights and hotels, images, attractions, events, maps and a weather overview.
Attraction Answers: Bing attractions now features 60K attractions Worldwide, ~20K attractions US.

Image search:

Bing’s new image search organizes images in a more intuitive way and brings back additional categories
Collage Answers: Richer instant answers across entertainment verticals including music, movies, TV and Games.

Entertainment:

Landing pages for movies and television shows will now include organizational tabs to allow people to explore more detailed information such as trailers, reviews and showtimes.
Extended TV listings and episode guides will be integrated into search results, along with TV clips and show information.

Whew . . . Lots of this stuff is really useful and “cool.” The challenge for Bing and Microsoft is to make ordinary users aware of it. Map Apps, for example, are really interesting and engaging but they’ve been “hidden” behind the Sliverlight wall and not well promoted by Microsoft. Now the company is bringing some of that experience into the non-Silverlight version of Bing Maps.

Conceptually almost all these changes and upgrades are intended to make good on the notion of Bing being a “decision engine” and help people put together necessary information or take the next step in a process or conduct a transaction directly on the site or mobile app. As I said, we’ll drill down on some of these features later in more depth.

Postscript: See our follow-up pieces on some of these announcements:

Microsoft Adds Photosynth To Virtual Earth

Matt McGee — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:54:52 +0000

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.

Microsoft Releases Large Volume Of New Images For Maps

Greg Sterling — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:46:17 +0000

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.

Microsoft Taking On Google Street View With “GeoSynth”?

Greg Sterling — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:29:48 +0000

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 Maps Adds User Photos To Street View

Greg Sterling — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:34:15 +0000

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.