You’ve heard us say it before – Bing is about helping you make better decisions. Bing Local is designed to bring that power closer to home. We’ve had a blast hearing from folks about the tools and features we put into the product to help them research and plan get togethers in their hometowns or in far-away cities they were visiting. Some of our “geek core” have gone deep on the features, giving us great feedback on tools like category filters, ratings and review scorecard, hints in driving directions, and Bird’s eye views. We thought we’d highlight just a few of our favorites to make your local decision-making easier and faster:
Bing Local is a one-stop shop that makes it easy to decide on what new restaurant you should try.
The last few weeks we’ve had a lot of sun, and up in the Northwest we know we have to use it while we’ve got it, so I’ve been doing a bunch of “outdoor dining” filtering. You can also filter by price, cuisine, and even by best places for “people watching”. Search for “restaurants” on Bing and you can browse and filter your way to a new dining experience. The advanced filtering allows you to tailor your decision making process down to minute detail, letting you really find the right place, rather than a list of thousands.
Ratings and reviews scorecard lets you know what other customers think about your chosen joint, arming you with real information before you walk in the door.
We gather reviews from across the www and pick out the common positive and negative things people have said. We add that all up and build an easy to read scorecard. So when you’re ready to pick a restaurant, you can just glance at the scorecard to find the best place for the criteria you care about.
Seeing where you want to go from a bird’s eye view.
This thing just rocks. Use Birds Eye View when you need to figure out where to park, when you want to see where a building is and what it looks like, or when you’re planning your next trip. Explore the sights in Italy or tour the hotels on the Vegas strip. There is so much you can do and the imagery is incredibly vivid. Take a look at a Bing Maps imagery slideshow to see for yourself.
Bing Maps gives you driving directions like a friend would. Oh, and it’s smart enough to assume you already know how to get out of your driveway.
When someone is giving you directions, it’s very natural for them to say something like “turn left at the Chevron station” and “if you cross 160th street you’ve gone too far”. Bing Maps does this too. And with one-click directions, Bing Maps assumes you are smart enough to get to the major arteries and just handles the detail at the destination end. Next time you need directions that are easy to understand and use, try using Bing Maps to get you there.
We hope that these local features will help make your next driving and dining experiences that much easier!
-Lori Stock, Bing Maps
I do like the birds eye view on bing maps.
Great features give clear image then google map
It would be really neat if Bing Local could one up Google Local/Maps.I'd like it if Bing Local would:
- Show the usual opening/closing hours on a daily basis for more locations
- Give users the option to write their reviews in the ScoreCard format (for those that want to and have time, it would bring in a lot more useful information)
- More icons: Would it hurt to have an open/close indicator if the business is operating at the moment, logos of credit cards supported, etc. Icons really help those of us who are visually oriented, rather than lots of text.
- List nearby businesses - I'd like to know what business are exactly nearby, without having to guess from Birds-Eye view.
- List similar restaurants: If I like this restaurant, maybe I'm interested in another one like it.
- Explain what "Price" means: Is that the average price, or what? How did Bing come up with this?
- Allow users to upload 'better' photos - Only a few businesses actually have photos, and InfoUSA quality is pretty low. MSN City Guides lets you do this, why not Bing Local?
That's just a few suggestions I wanted to add. Hopefully the team is listening.
I especially like Bing Local search. So informative and the Map makes it a real winner. I believe Bing will win more than 50% of search share within a year.
Excellent!
Now how about having some faith in your own system and ditch Multimap in the UK and replace it with Bing Local/Bing Maps...?
Seriously, Multimap is so dated compared to Bing Maps and Google Maps. Your integrated feature set is so much more impressive. Why not get the Multimap team working on porting their features into your own service?
Hello,
I just wanted to point this out as a usability thing. When I run a search like "restaurants in Bethesda" on the map search box I do not get the above features. Does this make sense.
That would be one improvement, making the web and map search box show the same style results with features for verticals.
Bing Local is a great service
Very nice post ! Bing is always my favorite browser from the day it is launched .. i never thought about leaving google but today i almost left it :)
Great job with the Bing local and filter settings!
I was really stunned by the Bird's eye feature and the scorecard feature for the shops and restaurants near us. The feature can be extended worldwide to get more users. This localised settings can be one of the major advancement that Bing has done.
I love the results keep up the great work! Cheers
This new driving directions service seems very clean. I will have to give it a try over my usually tools.
