A lot of bloggers are taking their first look at VE and wondering why thy would use it instead of Google maps and Google Local. Why? Because our amps go to 11. Seriously, I guess it’s really a matter of taste and utility. At Virtual Earth our goal isn’t just to build an impressive feature list. More importantly to us, we want to enable our users to carry out everyday useful tasks REALLY well. Sure, we’ve built monster features like Autolocate and Autorefresh into VE, but it’s the user scenarios they enable that will keep people coming back to MSN Virtual Earth day after day. Let’s take a quick tour of how we have enabled you to carry out some of these most common tasks.

Finding stuff in a region

The MSN Virtual Earth and Local Search teams work really close. The result is a seamless integration of the best business listings, yellow pages, and local search with Virtual Earth. Here’s an example. I want to see where all the Buca di Beppo restaurants are between Philly and DC. This is so simple in VE! Navigate your map so that you have a nice view of the corridor from Philly to DC like this.  Now enter “buca di beppo” in the What field and hit return. VE will do a search for all of the businesses in the current map view. Search results open to reveal all of the Buca restaurants in the region – just what you were looking for.

Over at Google Local, as much as I try, I can’t find what I’m looking for. I can get a map of the region easy enough  but then when I hit the Local Search link and enter “buca di beppo” in the What field, I get a bunch of nearly random listings and the map view is zoomed out further than I had requested.

Finding things that are near other things

How often have you wanted to see where certain businesses were, relative to other businesses or landmarks? Is there a bookstore near an oil change place? Which downtown movie theater is convenient to an Indian Restaurant? We’ve made it easy to have multiple searches active in Virtual Earth at once to easily spot these patterns. Let’s continue the scenario from the previous example. I want to now see where the Olive Garden’s are relative to the Buca di Beppo’s. I Enter “Olive Garden” in the What field and hit return. (or just click here) Notice that now you have two searches open, and both are color coded and displayed on the map at once. For those that are fully or partially color blind, each search is drawn with a different shaped icon. There are a lot more Olive Gardens than will fit in one search result panel, but using the Next and Previous links in that particular result panel, you can easily page through them. HINT – On the Options panel you can set your preference as to how many results you’d like to see at a time.

I want to adjust my location and still see my search results relative to my location

Just because I searched for Olive Garden and Buca di Beppo near Philly/DC doesn’t mean that’s the only place I want to see them! If I pan down to North Carolina, I want my current searches to come along for the ride! If I jump over to Albuquerque, I want my search results to reflect that. In Virtual Earth, whenever you pan, zoom or jump the map (by entering something in the ‘Where’ field), your searches are automatically refreshed. Try it, its fun. Use the compass control to start panning down the coast. Drag the map over to Alabama. Try zooming in. Your current searches will continuously refresh to only show you results that are within your current map view. This is a KEY attribute of searching in Virtual Earth – the map view is continuously filtering your search results. Play with it for a few minutes to fully appreciate the power and convenience!

Keep a convenient list of things I care about

Virtual Earth makes it easy to discover and explore, finding new things along the way. Think of the scratch pad as your refrigerator door – A convenient place to stick things that you find and want to recall later. When you search for an address, it is automatically added to your Scratch Pad. You can hover your mouse over any pushpin on the map and hit the ‘Add to Scratchpad’ link in the popup to have it added to the Scratchpad as well. When you close a search, items on the Scratch Pad will stick around. And as you pan around the map, you can always click on an item in the Scratch Pad to jump back there. Try adding some of your open search results to your Scratchpad, or just click this link. 

It’s really easy to build lists like this and email them to yourself or friends, or post them to your MSN Space. Links to do so are conveniently located in the Scratch pad’s header. Currently there is a limit of only having 5 items at a time on your Scratchpad for the Beta of Virtual Earth, but this will change shortly.

Here are my favorite eatin and drinkin places in my hood

things to remember for my trip to Albany this week.

You get the idea…

Find stuff that is near me

I’m sitting in my hotel and I want to find a movie theater near me. Or a restaurant. Or a museum. Or pharmacy. Such a common task! Sure, I can enter the address of my hotel in the ‘Where’ field. But that’s so lame. Plus I’m really lazy and don’t want to get up to walk across the room to the desk to find out the hotel’s address. In VE, you can hit the ‘Locate me’ link in the header to have VE automatically determine your location. Try it by clicking this link.  If you have a WiFi capable laptop, tablet or desktop running Windows, your location lookup can be highly accurate, often to 40 feet or so! If you don’t have WiFi or aren’t running on Windows, VE will fall back to try to use your IP address to determine your location. This is FAR less accurate, often only to the city centroid or so. But if you have WiFi, you’ll be blown away by this feature. It’s beta, and we are improving it steadily, but its already pretty sick. And of course, your open and future queries adjust to the current map view.

That at least scratches the surface – get in there and have some fun and discover some of the other nifty tasks you can do with VE. The MapPoint team is dedicated to continually improving the product, so let us know what you want to see next.