The Live Search Maps China site just got some improvements. Innovation is burning like wildfire worldwide.

Driving Direction – New!

• Country-wide (mainland China) road coverage
• Inter-city (e.g. Beijing to Shanghai) and intra-city (e.g. Tiananmen to Bird's Nest in Beijing) directions
• Multi-point directions (e.g. Tiananmen to Bird’s Nest to MS office)
• New data pipeline for China driving data

Transit Direction

• Improved performance by reducing engine average response time by 27% without quality degradation
• China is now the first VE market to ship both Driving and Transit Directions

VE China API

• Enabled server side logging for VE China API.
• Upgraded China API to latest V6.2

Real-time traffic:

• Added coverage for Shanghai - We now provide real-time traffic for Beijing and Shanghai.

Send-to-mobile

• Switched to new SMS channel with better coverage (GSM and CDMA) and higher success rate (>97%)

Local Search

• Improved Coverage for Map Answer and Phonebook Answer
• Map Answer triggered by query pattern “location + map (地图)”, e.g. search for “北京 地图”
• Rich UX in Phonebook Answer with map thumbnail (currently at 5% flight), e.g. search for “上海 ATM”
• Phonebook Answer triggered by location detection

Data updates

• 337 cities with street level map (previously 289);
• 10M POI/YP records (previously 7M) for 337 cities (previously 114);
• 600+ categories for Local Search (previously 200+)
• ~15K crawled and merged records in POI/YP data

I need to track down all these international sites. We're going worldwide so fast!

CP