Microsoft has updated Bing Maps by adding several new features and also with a new look and new feel. This is one of several updates being made by Microsoft to its Bing site over the period of a week. One other major update was to Bing Video. One can expect more such changes with Microsoft appearing determined to improve its share in the Internet search and related activities.
On Bing Maps site, certain changes have been made to the color scheme to give it a better look. One noticeable change is a new navigation bar along the bottom of the welcome pane (see image below):
Each button in the navigation bar loads a certain feature on Bing Maps. Welcome button loads the welcome pane; the car loads the route planner; the star button loads My Places; the envelop loads the ability to share the map with someone via email; the printer icon is for printing; and, stop-light button will load a traffic overlay with the flow and incident information.
You can get route directions/maps between any two places by entering the address, business or landmark details in the starting location (“A”) and the ending location (“B”), in the designated fields in the left pane of Bing Maps (see below):
For example, I got the following route map from New York to Washington D.C.:
Of course, you can zoom in this route map to a resolution of up to 50 feet to get the clearest view of the actual route.
Some of the new features added to Bing Maps are as under:
(1) Draggable Routes: You can generate a route, and change it, just by grabbing and dragging it to a location from where you want the route to go. To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter the starting and ending locations, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line to pass through a new location. The route will be regenerated.
(2) Zoom Bar: Zoom bar allows you to zoom in and zoom out. It also allows you to jump to specific zoom levels within the predefined settings.
(3) Smarter search box: The Bing Maps search box will do the “command parsing” to understand what you want. For example, for getting driving directions from one location to another, enter place names separated by “to” word. To get traffic information, for example, enter “New York traffic”. The search box will do the rest to help you.
(4) Embed a Map from Bing Maps to your web site: Bing Maps allows you to take a map view and embed it into your web site. It can automatically generate the code after you make selections of the map view and other settings. You can simply copy and paste this generated code into your web page to display the desired map on your website.
In addition to adding these and some other features (such as navigation bar, as already discussed above), the performance of delivering Bing Maps to your computer has also been improved. Firstly, Microsoft will now serve Bing Maps from seven different data centers in different locations in the world making it faster for you to access the information by getting it from the closest geographic node to where you are physically located. Secondly, the default Bing Maps home page size has reduced from 678kb to 484kb to load it faster.
I conclude this article with a remark that most of these new features in Bing Maps already exist in Google Maps; and also by displaying a street view map with the highest resolution of 50 feet taken from Bing Maps (click on the image below for a slightly enlarged view):
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