Huge Bing Maps Worldwide Update
August 4, 2009 18 Comments
Looks like Microsoft rolled out a huge new release of Bing Maps. From Chris Pendleton’s blog:
We just deployed 41TB of new satellite imagery, aerial photography and vector data forBing Maps covering 189,000+ square kilometers of Earth including 12,000+ square kilometers of Bird’s Eye photography. Did we get your town this time? Check out the Bing Maps World Tour to sit back, relax and watch the Bing Maps Silverlight Control take you through every new local with new data. Alternatively, you can immerse yourself into the application and explore for yourself.
You can get the whole list by clicking through to Chris’ blog.
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So what? Size and how hard is Microsoft’s problem not mines. How does this make Live provide me with better Software Engineering tools?
It was good fun while it lasted…
Bada
It is ridiculous that all the map providers, including Bing, Google, Mapquest, etc., toot their horns that they are the most updated, the best, and such, while not really updating their imagery for most than 2 years in some locations, like, for example, 5827 SW 73 Street, Miami, Florida, where the aerial still shows a construction site, while the huge building has been developed and used for almost 2 years now. At least, Google shows it in the Street View, although it still keeps the aerial image not updated. This is even more ridiculous that it stays that way even after me notifying them numerous times about this problem.
I wish for 2 year old imagery. I live in upstate New York. Much upstate New York State Bing imagery dates from the 1990′s, and is black & white. The contrast between that and beautiful Bird’s Eye obliques of the same areas is quite silly.
Ridiculous, silly, and so disappointing…sigh.
If you think Bing, Google, et al are woeful and outdated, then you probably haven’t been to the USGS map store lately.
Now, there’s an online resource that’s in need of some serious updating. FWIW, the official United States map resource for your address in South Miami is 15 years old, and compiled on a map base that was made 22 years ago.
The services Bing, et al, are offering are stunning in comparison.
skobola, mm:
I certainly understand why you’d want new imagery for your areas but it’s just not realistic to think there would or should be new imagery everywhere. The whole idea of the online maps supplied by the big 3 search providers is to monetize the searches and those are logically going to be the bigger urban areas. The VE/bing group has a list of priority cities to get done and it’s a pretty predictable list that starts with NY/NJ, Los Angelese and the 909, Boston, DC and you can figure out the rest fairly easily.
Also, I’m crtain you’re not appreciating the scale of the task. When we were pounding out the initial new cities in VE with UltraCam data, we ended up with petabytes worth of data to process and needed every night and weekend cpu cycle to do the job. Most of the large and medium cities in the US have been flown in the last 2 years with new UltraCam imagery but starting around the first of the year the home office switched the priority over to hammering out the massive amount of oblique data that was flown by Pictometry and acquired by M$.
I don’t need to stick up for the evil empire, especially after they laid off myself and a bunch of friends from the VE shop back in May, but it’s just not reasonable to think there should be a faster revisit date to suit everyone given the amount of imagery there is to process. We flat out worked our @sses off to pound out the massive amount of new imagery uploaded to the (gag) bing maps site in the last 2 years.
Good luck getting new stuff out there now though, it’s a skeleton crew of hard working folks at the VE/bing shop.
By the way skobola I take personal offense at the area of Miami you were talking about because that was one of the first blocks of UC imagery I processed at the VE Shop
my initial test result shows that Bing is as good as Google when displaying relevant search results. Google might be having a tough competitor with Microsofts own search engine.
file this under who cares…maybe this is a big accomplishment for MS. other places just call this another day at the office.
Do folks not realize the cost of acquiring, providing, and serving this data? Two years? You’re lucky its not five year old. I’ve been talking about this in my line of business for a couple of years now: the “google earth” effect… everyone expects this birds eye view stuff to be real-time for every point on earth. They think it actually comes from satellites. Its just not realistic, folks. Who do you think is paying for this stuff?
Well it is usually the tax payer who is either paying it for or at least subsidizing it.
Their reward, having to pay for it a second time or have to use it inside someones API.
… or what we Brits call the “Ordnance Survey Effect”…
It’s about time taxpayers started being able to see and use the (local) maps we’ve been paying for lo all these years. Just try and get a copy of your Anytown, America GIS data and use it for yourself.
GoogleBingMap are serving back what the rest of the world has been missing for decades.
Thanks, y’all.
My unemployment checks courtesy of M$ are thanks enough!
Microsoft Bing would be the closet competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant results on the serp.
i have been evaluating the search results of Microsoft Bing compared to Google and they are comparable. Bing gives almost the same relevant search results just like Google.
Bing search engine gives almost the same search results as Google. Looks like Google will now have a tough competition when it comes to search engine technology.
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