Lately there’s been a lot of discussion about how to find what you’re looking for locally. It’s a very large percentage of queries, but providing great results for these searches is a bit different from more general queries. The initial results need to be more specific and take location into account, while still offering quick ways to narrow your search and make your decision about where to go. For example, a search for Chinese...
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Ever listen to your favorite song and wonder what inspired the artist to write it?  Curious if there’s hidden meaning behind the lyrics?  Starting tomorrow, you will have the opportunity to immerse yourself in a multi-platform search experience to learn how one of today’s most iconic artists shares his life experiences through his lyrics.  In anticipation of the release of his first book, DECODED, which will be on...
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Today at Tech Ed, 2010 in New Orleans, LA we’re announcing some big additions to Bing Maps which focus around both developers and end users. First, we’re officially announcing an SDK for developers to build Map Apps for Bing Maps. Bing Map Apps are web services that are being integrated as an application layer within Bing Maps. With the release of the SDK, developers can now create their own map apps built on top of Bing Maps and...
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This week Bing Maps and Microsoft Research will be heading to San Jose to attend O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, architect of Bing Maps will kick off the event keynote at 9am and will also take part in “The Big Picture, from the Big Players” panel at 2pm alongside Danny Sullivan and folks from Yahoo!, Google and Yelp. If you can’t make it to the keynote, the speech will be live streamed...
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Do you ever find yourself gazing up at the sky on a night filled will stars and wondering what’s with all the sparkling lights, or where the heck are the Big and Little Dippers, anyways? I know I have a time or two. Luckily for us the Bing Maps team has been busy integrating their work with the Worldwide Telescope (WWT) into Bing Maps so that we can actually make sense of what is happening up there. With the new Bing Maps WWT App you can...
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Have you ever thought about all the content and media out there on the Web? Information that we use daily to help make decisions, like reviews of the best restaurant for chicken parmesan or the t-shirt shop perfect for a vintage G&R t-shirt? We all know that you can find nearly anything on the web in the form of blogs, websites, user reviews, tweets, etc. But the Web is changing. In the past we have been forced to ‘disassociate&rsquo...
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Are we all back from the holidays yet?  For some on the maps team, the holiday’s biggest gift was getting to work on updating the Bing Maps experience based on what you told us you wanted to see.  Why are things in beta anyway?  It’s so we can try new experiences, hear what you like and don’t like and understand what is hard for you all to use and how we can make it easier.  Fast forward six weeks: we’re...
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Holy Twilight-mania! I attempted to look for information on Twilight and there are, well, hundreds if not thousands of Twilight sites out there, I found myself buried in a torrent of Twilight hysteria. I mean, I have heard about this phe-nom but did not truly, culturally, philosophically understand it until today.  So in the midst of my Twilight research I found some pretty cool stuff that we’ve done across MSN and Bing that brings a...
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Today we celebrate a really great day for both high-resolution satellite imagery and kids in schools.  That might seem like a strange combo so let me explain. Yesterday DigitalGlobe launched their new WorldView-2 satellite into space – you can read more about it here.  Yours truly, along with Betsy Aoki, were on hand for the launch to watch a couple of pounds of rocket fuel go whoosh.  We’re excited about the level of...
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We announced the imminent arrival of Bing last week and the excitement has been building ever since. Beginning today, www.Bing.com opens its front door worldwide. Welcome! We hope you enjoy the new experience and can’t wait to hear your feedback. Want some sample queries to try? Check out “Nordstrom,” “Fedex,” “Seattle Mariners,” “Justin Timberlake,” “fitness,” &ldquo...
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