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Spatial Search from Bing Maps -

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Spatial Search from Bing Maps

posted Fri, Feb 12 2010

Sometimes my job is made really easy by other people. Today that person is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who is a Bing Maps Architect.

I first met Blaise back in 2007, when he took me through some of the cooler stuff to demo on Photosynth and Seadragon.

Back then, he explained that what you see in the above video and currently on Bing Maps in the US would be possible one day.

It’s great to work somewhere where dreams like this become a reality, and there are people like Blaise around to explain it all so eloquently.

On the Bing Blog the team have talked about what they call Spatial Search

“The idea behind Spatial Search came from looking at human psychology and trying to understand how we as humans make decisions. We use all our senses: sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste.

Today’s blue-link model doesn’t do a good job in tapping any of those senses and instead made you visually recreate models in your head to get through complex tasks. In other words, when you read a review of that French bistro, you had to manufacture everything: the street location, the ambience, where exactly in the city it was, and more. 

While we’re not working on smell-o-search (yet!), we do think we can do a better job with the ‘sight’ and ‘touch’ senses you rely on every day.

It’s going to take a little while to get there. But we believe our focus on your needs as searchers and more importantly as people will ultimately help us build technology to reconnect the wandering data to where it wants to be – the real world.”

Watch the video, read the blog post and imagine how this thinking could change your lives.

Cheers

Mel

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Comments

  • Fri, Feb 12 2010 04:45AM

    way to rip off google... the only thing new is your stars system you added

    yawnnn

  • Fri, Feb 12 2010 04:53AM

    {chuckles} Thanks for the feedback GOY - did you read the post on the Bing Blog www.bing.com/.../spatial-search-the-next-frontier.aspx

  • Fri, Feb 12 2010 05:04AM

    I really like the new features... and to me, this seems a huge improvement. The photo addition is a useful and interesting feature.  This is not the equiv of Google, where a google camera drives around and shows us what it looked like when they were there. For business owners, this is a crucial difference.  Say a business painted their storefront yellow, but the stock version shows a white storefront... A business owner could go out, take a new pic, upload it in flickr, and voila, his yellow storefront would be available to HIS/HER customers.

  • Fri, Feb 12 2010 05:23AM

    Wow thats pretty cool, so worthwhile watching at 720 resolution in full screen!

    The Bing maps search feature still needs a heap of work to catchup so people will actually start using Bing more.  I have been trying to use Bing as the default search engine in Chrome but so many simple actions Im used to on Maps just doesn't work :(

  • Fri, Feb 12 2010 02:08PM

    For the first person who opted to leave an anonymous comment ("Google Owns You"):

    Actually you're dead wrong. First, the mashup between Photosynth and Bing Maps is not immitative nor really derivative of Google Maps.

    Further, Google Maps was arguably immitative of prior map interface systems, particularly Yahoo! Maps. And, both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps were likely heavily influenced-by and inspired-by earlier Mappoint software, which is also a Microsoft product.

    So, it's not at all accurate to glibly dismiss Bing Maps as being a "rip off" of Google. The various mapping systems have influenced one another, but if you really want to trace it back, you'll see that Microsoft's Mappoint predates the existence of Google Maps by quite a few years.