Gregory Szorc's blog

Live Search Maps Now The Leader in Online Mapping

In case you missed it, Microsoft's Live team updated their Live Search Maps late Monday. It is now my preferred online mapping service. Here are some reasons:

• Dynamically updating business listings. Center the map on a point. Now search for a business or category (e.g. "pizza"). Now pan the map. The listing of businesses automatically updates to show listings over your new location. (Yahoo Maps also does this)
• Automatically zoom to a bounding box. Using your middle mouse button, click, hold, and drag to create a box. When you release, the map will be zoomed on that box. The smaller you make the box, the larger the magnification. The larger the box, the less it is zoomed in.
• 1-Click directions. For each point or business, the interface gives you easy access to "1-click directions," which are directions from the north, east, west, and south. If there are major roads (freeways) near, it will give you directions from those. I can't tell you how convenient this is, since many times you just care about the final few steps of the journey (not getting from your house to the freeway).
• Collections. It allows you to organize listings and businesses into custom collections. Very handy. (Google added this today.)
• Driving directions calculated from current traffic. It is one thing to have an overlay listing current traffic conditions. Google gives you the ability to manually drag routes to adjust them, but Live Maps does it for you automatically. So useful!
• It tells me when traffic data was updated. Yes, I know this is minor, but it gives you piece of mind. You barely notice it in the bottom right, but at least it tells you. You know you aren't looking at stale data.
• It shows traffic incident details. When traffic is turned on, it gives pins that show you details of incidents. The most important detail is an estimate of when the incident will be over. Other interfaces leave you scratching your head over their origin or duration.
• All the features are easy to use. The interface provides all of these features, yet isn't cumbersome. Kudos to the user interface team for getting it all in there.

You can find many of these features in other online mapping products, but not one combines them all. If you combined the best of Google and Yahoo, you would get a good number, but you still don't have the clean interface, the route calculations based on traffic, bounding box zooming, and traffic incident details.

With this release, Live Search Maps emerged as a clear front-runner in the online maps race. I wonder how long it will take Google and others to reach feature parity...

Until someone gives me a reason to reconsider, maps.live.com is my mapping tool of choice.

You can ping this entry by using http://blog.case.edu/gps10/mt-tb.cgi/15796 .

It would have been nice though if they didn't remove a feature. Although it's minor it would have been nice to keep the graph showing how far you are zoomed in. Not only does it make it easy to know how zoomed in. It also makes it only one click to zoom from street view to city/state so you can go find something else.

Also Collections is not new and 1-click directions can be downright silly at times (gee you start 2 blocks away on the same rd to get to the place? That's uh... useful...)

Microsoft does have more features, and I do use it more for messing around, but Google by far has more up to date satellite maps, and Google Earth is many times better then Virtual Earth - If only because it can be used on a typical computer with out bringing it to a screeching halt.

To amend my post... Perhaps the 1-click directions do work correctly. Maybe it was a bug or maybe I was zoomed in to much, but whatever the case it works now.