Software engineers tend to spend a lot more time working out at the driving range than they do the putting green. Left on our own we’d all be working on stuff like 3D Birds Eye navigation or robotic building modeling; doing a local search for a coffee shop would require first getting strapped up like this Microsoft Researcher to the right so that we could predict where you wanted to find it and if you prefer decaf. Fortunately our team is lead by a seasoned cast of veteran cat herders who continuously remind us how important it is to be creating and improving the core features you use everyday at our site - driving directions, geocoding, map navigation, local search… else you might not want to return to explore Collections and create 3D tours.

When we launched the Gemini release of Live Search Maps last week there was plenty of coverage of the new gee-wiz features like 3D modeling. Now I present to you my list of the top 10 improvements aimed at delighting you; features that quietly improve your daily experience and at the same time make the more talked about features really shine. To go with another sports analogy, I present to you the starting offensive line of Live Search Maps

 1. Rolled up routes or Abbreviated Directions. I guess I don’t really know what to call it, I just wonder why no one thought of it sooner. The idea here is that you are usually familiar with either the start or end of your route and don’t need to take a giant printout with you of all of the steps telling you how to get from your house to the highway.  For instance, as seen here and prints nicely on a single sheet of paper.

2. Improved Directions Printing. When printing your routes to take with you in the car, a number of improvements were made to improve readability as well as the instructions themselves. The most obvious are the font, color, and grouping changes but it goes much further. My favorite is the "You’ve gone too far if…" hint. When one person gives directions to another, its very natural to say something like "if you hit Thomas Street you went too far". As you can see 3. Category Browsing in an Unfamiliar area. If you’re traveling to a new city one of the first things you might do is enter the city name to get a map. But what next? Chances are that you want to explore the area and see what businesses are nearby. In this version of Live Maps we’ve added Yellow Page category browsing and put it right on the result panel after doing a location search. You can dive into the most popular yellow page categories or click ‘Browse all categories’ to drill in from the top of the category hierarchy. The count of businesses in each category is updated as you move around the map. For instance, after a search for Topeka, KS I selected in this link you can see I stepped all the way back to the top, then drilled into Health and Beauty -> Doctors and Clinics -> Pediatricians.

                             

4. Ghost nodes while drawing lines and shapes.  When Google came out with their implementation of Live Search Maps’ Collections a few months back (known as My Maps) they added a very nifty editing feature we hadn’t thought of. I liked it so much that I offered a congratulatory beer to the engineer that came up with it; an offer that was never taken up but still stands We’ve added the feature (which I dubbed ghost node editing) to this release and made some enhancements of our own making re-shaping a line or polygon smooth like butter. In edit mode when you hover over a line segment a ghosted node appears and follows your mouse. Just click at the place you want to split the segment and drag the new node. You can reshape a polygon so quickly and accurately that it won’t seem like work anymore. Another fabulous but often overlooked feature in this area is the real-time distance tooltip while drawing that lets you know how big your object is. For polygons we also show you the area of your shape when you are done editing - even for complex geometries.

5. Severe Traffic indication. We’ve added a 4th class of traffic speed to the overlay of traffic flow indicating a complete log jam. Previously we had green, yellow and red highlighting to indicate traffic speeds. But feedback from users was that the red category (0 to 15 mph) was too large and in fact there’s a big difference in being caught in traffic that isn’t moving at all versus at least rolling along at 10mph. So black was born and now indicates where you’ll be completely camped out while red is at least crawling.

6. Subscribe to changes in a KML file via RSS. Earlier this year we introduced a feature to enable you to pluck an RSS feed for a Collection for use in your news reader of choice. All of the convenience of staying up to date on your favorite blogs brought to spatial data! With this release we’ve extended this support to KML files hosted on the web. Best of all, using it is identical to plucking a feed for a Collection. Once added to your news reader, you’ll be alerted whenever the author of the original KML makes edits or additions to their  file. Best illustrated with an example. Here is a KML file showing the location of moon trees planted in the US. When the KML viewer opens you can click the subscribe button to grab its RSS feed and add it to your newsreader. [like this] behind the scenes, what is served out is the GeoRSS flavor of RSS so your KML subscription is viewable in traditional readers as well as those with explicit support for Geography! When the author adds or edits the original file, changes will show up at the top of the news feed.

7. Force Feedback with XBOX controller. If you use the XBOX controller to fly through VE3D maps, you’ll now notice that if you bump into buildings or the ground the controller vibrates. This is especially handy when you back into something.

8. Category Sensitive Details page. Each business listing at Live Search Maps has a details page that acts like a ‘homepage’ for the business, displaying a summary of everything we know about it. Basic address/phone number info, storefront photos, ratings & reviews, 1-click directions (party maps) and much more, all laid out in a really crisp style.  There’s also a bunch of information about the business that has been crawled from the web or supplied directly to us from partners like Judy’s Book and CitySearch. All together it adds up to a very exhaustive look at the business that should prove really helpful when making a choice among many options. My favorite addition to the details page is the category specific information provided by InfoUSA, Expedia, WCities and others. To view this info click the ‘expand’ links like the one shown here. Some of the categories that have this feature include:

• Dentists - Number of chairs, patients seen each week, Medical School…
• Hotels - direct reservation links, price range, hotel class, nearest airport code, …
• Doctors - gender, size of practice, number of staff…
• Restaurants - average price, reservation info, outdoor seating…

 

9. Traffic sensitive routing. when you live in a congested city like LA or Seattle being able to generate driving directions that take you around the traffic can have huge benefits. We introduced real-time traffic flow overlays in Live Search Maps last year which is helpful and now we’ve taken it a big step further. instead of just showing you the hotspots along with a route that takes you right through them, we can now automatically route you around the traffic. In areas where we have real-time traffic information check the ‘route based traffic’ option as shown to the left and we’ll take care of the rest.

10. Transparent Buildings. The ability to share tours of your Collections is a great new feature in this release. If your tour happens to take the viewer through one of our densely populated 3D cities chances are that some of the textured buildings will get in the camera path that you want to fly the user through. The 3D team came up with a really clever solution to this problem - buildings that find themselves in the camera’s path ghost out temporarily, becoming semi-transparent as the camera approaches and flys through. its a wonderful subtle effect that greatly improves the tour experience. You can see this in the screen capture below or you can grab the full resolution video from my SkyDrive here to view it yourself.

There’s more I’d like to get to, but I’ll save it for a future post and keep this list to 10. Although the Gemini release is only 1 week old, we’re already deep into work on the next release. We hope while you are enjoying all of the new stuff in the latest Live Search Maps that you’ll take a moment to provide feedback and your wishlist for future versions. post your feedback in comments here or email me directly at SteveLom (at) microsoft d com.

Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager

Keep up with the latest Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps news at our Act Global, Search Local Blog

Continuing on with our “Do what I mean, not what I say”, blog post from last time, here are some additional categories we tackled with this initiative.

Equivalencies

“We do really badly on the query ca chp” a coworker complained in one email. 

“Ca chp?” I thought.  “What the heck does that mean?” 

It turned out it was pretty simple: “ca” was short for California and “chp” was short for California highway patrol.  Obviously, my coworker knew what he meant by the query ca chp, but I didn’t know it, and our search engine definitely didn’t know it.  After seeing many complaints from customers of this sort we began to realize that to truly improve the relevance of our search engine, it was more confirmation that we had to move past just simple keyword matching, and into understanding the intent of your query. 

So when you search for crossroads mall in OKC we take this to mean crossroads mall in Oklahoma City.  When you search for Julia child bio we’ll also look for Julia child biography to give you better results.  But of course, the same word could mean something different in another context.  Hence, when you search for nw university we we’ll search for northwestern university but if you search for nw co-ed soccer we’ll search for northwest co-ed soccer instead. 

Intelligent “stop word” retention
 
Another area that fell under the “Do what I mean, not what I say!” category were “stop words”.

What are “stop words” you ask?

Well, in Search Engine parlance they are words that oftentimes may not contain much “meaning” in the query  - words such as (a, the, in, etc…) and hence it may not be crucial as to whether they are found on the desired results page or not.   For example if the query was the aurora borealis, you probably wouldn’t be too concerned as to whether the word “the” was found on the top page returned or not, since “the” doesn’t contain much meaning here.  Hence, it may be perfectly acceptable to drop it from the query when retrieving pages.

However, if your query was The Office (the title of a popular televisions show) it would be absolutely ridiculous to drop the word “the” since the query would essentially change meaning - and we received a lot of emails about how we were doing just that.  In fact, previously we were routinely dropping all stop words – and knew this needed dramatic improvement.

In our recent release  we’ve overhauled our logic, and if you search for something where the “stop words” contain crucial meaning, we can sense thatand realize that “the” in The Office is crucial, or the “A” in Avenue A is crucial;   Whereas if you query for something like the aurora borealis we realize that the word “the” isn’t as crucial as the other query words.
 
Thanks, and let us know what you think!

Yes, that’s an odd title, let me explain.  

We’ve been working on returning the very best search results for your intent, not just for the particular search terms that you happen to have chosen as a vehicle to transmit that intent.  There’s an important difference there and it’s been our focus for quite some time.

For example, let’s suppose that you’ve decided to move to the state of Arizona.  You’d like to double check that how hot it gets there so you search for hottest temperature in the state of az.  In this case, the intent of the query was different than the search terms entered: it would be unfortunate if a particularly good result was excluded from the results simply because it contained the term Arizona instead of the abbreviation AZ.

In the new release of Live Search we’ve made a number of improvements in this area of more deeply understanding user intent.

AutoSpell Correction

The first example of this is our new AutoSpell feature.

If we are absolutely, completely, totally, “no doubt about it” confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a “Did you mean _______?” link at the top.

For example, there’s this pizza place near Microsoft called Pagliacci Pizza that is fantastic.  The problem is that I can never remember the correct spelling of the place.  My misspelled attempts are usually something along the lines of Pagliaci Pizza, Pagliaccis Pizza, or Paggliacci Pizza…

With AutoSpell correction I get the correct result the first time, regardless of the misspelling.  Instead of being two clicks away from pizza, I’m just one.  Being two clicks away just keeps people hungry, rather than satisfying their intent!

In the (hopefully) rare case that you ever see a mistaken correction in our AutoSpell feature, we provide a recourse link at the top of the page to enforce your original spelling.

Stemming 

Another improvement in the “Do what I mean, not what I say” category is stemming.  Stemming means matching on the “stem” (or root) of the word rather than the exact word.

For example, users told us that the search half price book Redmond returned horrible results.  Searching for half price books Redmond produced much better results.   In our new release of Live Search, searches for half price book Redmond automatically include results with books in them as well.

Our team knew that tackling stemming would give us the improvements we needed for searches like these.  But we had to be careful, because you can’t just stem all the time-you have to be smart about it.  An example of this is the word cable.  When you search for “cable,” you could be looking for information on cable TV providers.  When you search for “cables”, you could be looking for power, telephone, or network cables. 

We’re really happy with the improvements that stemming has made in Live Search.  Like everything else in the product, we will continue to tune and tweak things to give our users the best experience.

These are just the first two of several areas we tackled in the area of “Do what I mean, not what I say.”  We’ll be back soon to post about a few other items we released in this area.  Thanks and please let us know what you think!

On Monday the 15^th we also released a number of updates for our Live Search Mobile products, including:

• Voice input and gas prices in Live Search for Windows Mobile,


• A new beta for BlackBerry devices, and


• Improved mapping and directions in browser-based search for any mobile phone

Details are below - please check them out and let us know what you think!

Voice Input and Gas Prices Now in Live Search for Windows Mobile

Live Search has been a hit with Windows Mobile enthusiasts (read a few reviews here and here) for awhile now.  It’s a great way to get local search, mapping and navigation and today we’re making it even better. 

You can now speak your query instead of typing it!  Just press the lower left soft-key and say what you want, for example, “Anthony’s Pizza” or “Hardware Stores”.  We use advanced voice recognition technology to understand what you’re asking for and give you results. 

So far we’ve found it to be a really fast way to get answers for most searches.  This feature is currently in beta so let us know how well it works for you!  If it doesn’t recognize something you say, of course you can still type it in like you used to.

Another new feature is the ability to find nearby gas stations with the best prices.  Enter your location, select the Gas Prices icon, and you’ll see gas stations sorted by recent prices for regular unleaded gas.  Hours of operation are now included for many restaurants as well.

You can download the latest version from your phone at wls.live.com or read more information from your PC.

New - Live Search for BlackBerry® devices (Beta)

Today we’re also releasing a beta version of Live Search for our friends with BlackBerry devices.   It runs on BlackBerry version 4.0.2 and higher and provides the main benefits** of Live Search in an experience custom-designed for the BlackBerry.

You can download it now from your BlackBerry browser at wls.live.com or learn more on your PC. Please let us know what you think!

** The BlackBerry version provides local business search, mapping location, getting movie showtimes and traffic information. It does not include voice input, gas prices, business ratings and hours of operation at this time. 

Improved Mapping and Directions in Live Search via mobile browser

Our browser based mobile search at m.live.com is the core of our mobile search products.  It’s available on any mobile phone with Internet access and searches the broadest types of information-including websites, images, and news, as well as local businesses, maps, directions, and more.

We’ve made a number of improvements to it-especially in mapping and navigation.

We’re using new map styles throughout this product that make the maps even more readable on small screens.  Our directions now also take into account current traffic conditions-and if traffic is especially bad you can choose to have the system reroute you to avoid traffic backups. 

We’re also using the same driving direction hints as on the desktop version of Live Search Maps.  These hints give you the final cross streets in your route so you don’t drive too far.

Frequently accessed information like weather, stock quotes, and movie times will automatically appear on the main results page when you search for them.

To try it, go to m.live.com from your mobile phone’s Web browser to try it for yourself, or learn more from your PC.

Please send any feedback you have to lsmobile@microsoft.com, we’d love to hear from you!

On Monday we announced a new service that brings the power of local search to any phone-and lets you access it just by speaking. 

Think about all the times you need to find quick local information: you’re driving home from work and need make reservations at your favorite restaurant.  Or maybe you’re already downtown, and want to get movie times for theaters nearby along with a map and directions. Or perhaps you’re traveling and want to call the car rental agency to avoid the lines at the airport counter. 

Live Search 411 enables you to do this for free, from any phone in the US.  Just call 1-800-CALL-411 (1-800-225-5411) and say where you are and what you’re looking for.  You can also get text messages, maps, traffic maps, and text-based driving directions sent to your mobile phone (with a service plan that supports text messages or data access, of course!).

We’ve built this system in cooperation with Tellme, which we acquired in March of this year.  Tellme has been a leader in voice technology since 1999.  We’re excited about the voice experience and attention to detail they bring to this new service.

We’ve built Live Search 411 to go beyond just finding business information.  Because our goal is to help you complete your task, we’ve included features like:

• Connect to any business listing you find-for free


• Receive SMS links to maps, driving directions and traffic conditions (just say “text me the info”)


• Get movie showtimes and even buy tickets over the phone (via our partnership with Fandango)


• Share text messages of business details with friends so they can easily meet you there


• Hear the current weather conditions and the forecast


• Quickly access travel resources like airlines, hotels, and rental cars


• Remember your personalized locations for movie theaters, weather and traffic, and your preferences for receiving text messages.

Try it now

The best way to learn more is to try the service now at 1-800-CALL-411.  These audio demos also give you a taste of what to expect:

• Ice cream search


• Movie showtimes and tickets


• Share listing with friend

More info is also on our website.  Please let us know what you think by sending feedback to ls411@microsoft.com.  We look forward to hearing from you!

It’s no surprise to anyone who uses the Web that shopping is one of the leading online activities.  Many people use the Internet to research their next purchase or buy products online.   We’re here to help you find the product information you care about and make informed decisions. We’ve recently launched a richer experience when searching for products—from broad categories such as digital cameras to specific products such as Nikon d40.

Product Category Searches
For category searches we now show you popular products within that category.  The average rating and sales price are shown below the product image with an option to browse more products on MSN Shopping.  You can also research products you are interested in by reading the collection of user reviews and viewing a summary of the overall opinion that users have about that product.  We’ve indexed millions of products and user reviews through a combination of crawling Web sites and obtaining feeds from partner sites.

Computers and electronics are the most popular categories for product research online and this is where we put a lot of focus for this release.  But—because we know people look for other products (like Gucci bags) and not just Lcd tvs or Mp3 players—we will continue to increase our selection and depth for more categories in the future.

Searches to try: Digital cameras, Camcorders, Nikon digital cameras, Wireless headphones, Bulova watches, Gucci bags, Motorola cell phones

Specific Product Searches
Searches for specific products—such as Nikon d40—now show a quick summary of the product, including a graphical summary of user opinions (called “User reviews at a glance”).  Keep an eye out for a more detailed post on this brand new feature soon.

The team is continuously working on ensuring that product name variations trigger the relevant product results.  For example, as of this posting “Canon Rebel XT” doesn’t trigger a product, but Canon Rebel XTi does.

Searches to try: Nikon d40, Canon Rebel xti, Microsoft Zune, Palm Treo 650, Sony Ericsson k750i, Canon eos 5d, AT&T 8525, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100

Clicking on a product with ratings takes you to a detailed product summary page.  This page enables you to visually explore user opinions on various aspects of the product (quality, ease of use, etc) and filter them by both positive and negative opinions.

We look forward to your feedback to help us improve product results within Live Search.  We hope you enjoy using the new features we’ve recently rolled out!

In building 88 on Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, WA there is a small, but growing group of us that think about relevance constantly. We eat, live and breathe ideas and technology that makes our relevance better. Having worked on this release for a little over 9 months we could not be more excited about the relevance of our new engine.  From our metrics, and more importantly our usage as customers, our new engine is so far superior to our old one.  Consider this post a little tour guide, if you will, of our new engine and the things you might notice when you use it.

Improved core relevance
Core relevance is a hard thing to quantify or qualify. I think of it as those real searches you do day in and day out.  When people do fancy demos they use searches like Britney Spears…which is an important search, but doesn’t really reflect some of the tough things the engine sees every day.

I was trying to think of a good example of this and just as I was writing, bam, a bunch of us decided to head to our favorite spot for lunch: the Microsoft taco truck.  I was kind of curious what would come up for Microsoft taco truck.  Sure enough, Live Search has good stuff.  The chowhound.com result in particular has some great commentary which talks about the “secret” location in the VFW parking lot. If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend it.

This is core relevance.

Reduced spam
Spam is an arms race. A game of cat and mouse. We’re always going to be fighting people who threaten the integrity of our results by using illegitimate or malicious techniques. With this release of Live Search you should find the amount of spam is down quite considerably.

You might ask how we know spam is down?  Experts on our team take a “randomly selected and statistically significant” set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results. With this release that number is down in a non-trivial manner and we are excited about that.

Dramatically improved ”snippets”
One of the areas of search that does not get a lot of attention (but is incredibly important) are those little snippets of text or “summaries” for each result that describe the site you’re about to visit. Let me give you a flavor of some of our improvements in this area:

• Muse Starlight: No more JavaScript issues


• FBI: Notice we expand the acronym (to “Federal Bureau of Investigation”) and highlight it in the descriptions


• Microsoft: Navigational links indented in the first result help you find what you are looking for quickly.

We’ll blog more about this topic soon. Stay tuned.

Much bigger index!
We are now searching 20 billion Web pages. This is 4 times the size of our previous index. Enough said.

Well, one more thing – we now have the infrastructure to easily add billions (yes, billions) more with relative ease.  This ensures we are always pushing the envelope with regard to the amount of human knowledge in our index.

Do what you mean, not what you say
Last, but not least, we want users to be able to search in the manner they feel most comfortable.  It’s our job to be doing the smart thing to figure out what people really mean.  Here’s an example search from a real user: nw coed soccer.  Previously we did not take into account that NW and Northwest are equivalents. Now we do. The result?  Better relevance.  See for yourself.

This post covered about some of the work we’ve done to improve our core web results.  Over the coming weeks we will talk these features in more detail. 

We’re very excited about the improvements and we hope you will be, too.  Thanks and please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback!