p2pnet.net News:- Microsoft Corp is calling its forthcoming mapping service MSN Virtual Earth.

It’ll carry advertising and offer detailed local search results, “that include actual glimpses of the pizza joints and coffee shops rather than just the rooftop views satellite images allow,” say Bill and the Boyz in the Associated Press,” going on:

“It also will let people layer multiple searches - say grocery stores and dry cleaners - onto a single map.

High-fi images “captured by a fleet of small planes” will be added to the service in the fall, Stephen Lawler, general manager of Microsoft’s MapPoint business, is quoted as saying.

Not at all incidentally, Google features satellite imagery to its free mapping service and Amazon’s A9 search engine indexes 20 million street-level photographs of building exteriors in 10 major cities, AP points out.

"Although Yahoo! was the first to offer a comprehensive local search service in October 2004, Google Local has been running hard to catch up," says PC Pro. "MSN currently has no local search facility at all and as such is a glaring hole in its service.

"Microsoft estimates that the service will roll out in the US sometime in the third quarter of this year. No date for a British service, however, has been announced."

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See:-
Associated Press - Microsoft previews geo-mapping service, May 23, 2005
PC Pro - Bill Gates lifts the veil on MSN local search, May 24, 2005

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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