Bing Gets Mapping Enhancements, Local Tweets, and 'Entity Cards'

[engine]

Bing Gets Mapping Enhancements, Local Tweets, and 'Entity Cards' [news.cnet.com]

Microsoft is kicking Bing Maps into a higher gear, announcing a beta version of Bing Maps that uses Silverlight to display 3D images and its own version of street-level images.

The company announced the new beta Wednesday amid a discussion of other improvements to Bing Thursday at its San Francisco offices in a presentation for the media. Bing Maps Beta is rolling out Thursday along with several other new features in the main Bing search results.

In addition, Bing Maps Beta users will be able to see local tweets through a partnership with Twitter demonstrated during the event. Twitter recently rolled out a geolocation service.

Microsoft also talked about new enhancements to Bing called "entity cards," which are sections on the top of a search results page that contain a mix of structured and crawled data on a given topic. For example, searching on "Coldplay" will bring up an official photo of the band with a link to their Web page, tour dates, additional photos, and other information all displayed before your eyes scroll down to the search results themselves.

[JS_Harris]

About entity cards, it sounds like search is still inching closer to being a content provider. The sheer volume of all things "wordly" dictates that it would take a very long time to have content on every subject but for some subjects position #1 in serps is already at mid-page.

How much content would it take to cost a search engine its search status? I wish these types of "enhancements" were solely "opt-in" and sea4rch would focus on, you know, search.

[weeks]

JS Harris, I feel your pain. But, for those of us who are not looking for web traffic but foot traffic, managing things like "entrycards" is sweet.

But, you are right. It is important manage your web identity and you can't do that with just managing a web site. But, not everyone wants to be on Facebook, using Twitter or have an entry card.

Seriously, we need to look at consulting, getting paid to keep people from wasting their time and money. Yes, get a Twitter account. But, don't twitter.

[weeks]

OK, in that I am starting a mapping project with Google next week, I went and took a look.

Look, Bing a dings... if I can't draw a line on it & embed it, I'm not going to use this first. I'll make sure my areas are identified in your maps, but first I'll work with Google.

Bing has a long, long way to go. Good luck to them.

[J_RaD]

yea i noticed the entity card a few days ago, I thought it was pretty good. Seems like it groups all that data almost all on page one, then if you want to see SERPs like you used to go to page 2.

About entity cards, it sounds like search is still inching closer to being a content provider

they can't go down the same path as goo, and just be "another" goo. that won't set them apart and change the search game. Just being a copy isn't good enough.

[weeks]

I can't get the beta to work on FF, btw.

[skipfactor]

Bing brings it on Twitter Maps. Once geo-tagging populates, even grandma can follow tweets on a multi-state car chase.

And the Silverlight is smoking da AJAX. Sim City to street view, wow, impressive.