14 DAY TRIAL // In accordance with the evolution of the Virtual Earth underlying mapping, location, and search platform, Microsoft has also delivered a major feature update to Live Search Maps, the consumer side of the service. According to Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist, Microsoft has introduced improvements across the table in a variety of areas to complement the releases of the Virtual Earth Web Service 1.0, Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2, Virtual Earth 3D 3.0 and 3DVia from Dassault Systèmes.
“The Virtual Earth team has (...) released a major update that brings some great new features, as well as enhancements to existing features to Live Search Maps,” Pendleton explained. “[The] improvements are made possible by the new Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2. If you are an application developer or a webmaster, you can take advantage of these new Virtual Earth offerings as well.”
Pendleton revealed that the new feature release of Live Search Maps is designed to take a range of the service's components to the next level, including Communities, Local Search Vertical, Details page, Multi-Point Directions, Landmark Hints, Geocoding, Imagery Processing and Rendering, Vector Data, Localized Tiles, etc.
“Some of the highlights include: new imagery - brings locations to life, with richer bird's eye and 3D imagery of more locations in cities across North America. Near-matching capabilities - uses near-matching capabilities to find locations with alternate and similar spellings, resulting in a more relevant search experience. Landmark-based routing - enhances searching for customers in the U.S. and Canada by offering maps with familiar landmarks, such as gas stations and fast-food restaurants, called out by name.”
Users of the latest refresh of Live Search Maps will be able to enjoy real time weather integration in Virtual Earth 3D, localized maps across Europe, the overhauled vector data of roads and postal codes for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. At the same time, Microsoft has updated Aerial (ortho) and Bird’s Eye (oblique) imagery, as well as processing and rendering images.
In terms of actual search, Pendleton enumerated the following updates, “Search refinement - Searches can now be refined further through filters that become available based on what you search for. Hotels, Restaurants, and generic queries each have filters that you can use. Related searches - Related categories and neighborhoods with result counts allow you to see how many results there are before selecting a related search. This is the first time we’ve exposed aggregate counts on the results page. These will be present for many filters and related searches in future releases”.
Virtual Earth 3D is available for download here.
Virtual Earth Web Services SDK, Version 1.0 is available for download here.
Virtual Earth Map Control SDK 6.2 is available for download here.