If you’re at all like me, then you find Web search pretty frustrating when it comes to figuring out the local weather forecast. You pop a city’s name into a search engine and get a list of a few different weather sites. Oddly enough, they often have quite different forecasts for the days to come.
The question remains: sweater or no sweater?
Microsoft has taken some steps to solving this riddle – and a number of other irksome Web quandaries — through some fresh updates to its Bing search engine that it unveiled Wednesday. (Make that “decision engine” if you’re in Redmond.)
If, for example, you search for “weather mountain view ca,” Bing will return the usual results and present links to more information. Hit one of those links, and you’ll find some cleanly presented comparisons of forecasts from various weather services. So, with a quick glance, you can come up with an assessment about the range of temperatures and make a more discerning sweater decision.
Best of all, Microsoft keeps track of the accuracy of the forecasts over time and moves the most accurate forecasts higher up in the comparisons.
All told, it’s a minor advance in search technology, but this points to some concrete ways in which Microsoft is trying to outflank Google.
Another useful advance comes from what Microsoft calls entity cards. There are sort of like information boxes that appear at the top of search results, containing relevant information on topics like cities, musical artists and medical conditions.
Do a search for “Houston” and you get a card that lists the local weather, attractions and neighborhoods. If a lot of people are performing travel searches for a particular city, Bing will figure this out and present things like cheap airfares and event details as well.
The service works similarly for music artists, picking up, for instance, on whether or not they’re touring. If they are, then the card shows tour dates. One click later, you get a selection of places to buy tickets to a local show.
For the social-networking types out there, Microsoft soon plans to roll out deeper links to Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook service will show pictures of your friends in a grid and give you a graphical way to sort through the most active users. For Twitter, Microsoft will present ways to search tweets from, say, celebrities, politicians and authors and to view the most-active and most-read posters in various categories.
The real eye candy, though, comes through ways Microsoft has blended its search, map and photo technology.
Join me, if you will, at a test site for Microsoft’s new map service. Search for “met new york,” and then start zooming in. You’ll notice the images changing with every zoom, as Microsoft moves to different sets of photos it has collected – aerial shots down to the street level – in a smooth fashion.
(Warning: This technology requires Microsoft’s Silverlight software and tends to do better on faster PCs.)
Next, click on the little blue man located near the bottom of your screen. This should bring up a blue icon, as well as creating green flags on the Met. Each green flag represents sets of photos taken by people inside of the museum that you can explore in 3-D. Here’s a collection of 1,300 photos from one person.
This is some research and development wizardry that’s being rolled into an actual product. Will that translate into market share gains against Google? We’ll find out.