Archive for October, 2007

Software engineers tend to spend a lot more time working out at the driving range than they do the putting green. Left on our own we'd all be working on stuff like 3D Birds Eye navigation or robotic building modeling; doing a local search for a coffee shop would require first getting strapped up like this Microsoft Researcher to the right so that we could predict where you wanted to find it and if you prefer decaf. Fortunately our team is lead by a seasoned cast of veteran cat herders who continuously remind us how important it is to be creating and improving the core features you use everyday at our site - driving directions, geocoding, map navigation, local search... else you might not want to return to explore Collections and create 3D tours.

When we launched the Gemini release of Live Search Maps last week there was plenty of coverage of the new gee-wiz features like 3D modeling. Now I present to you my list of the top 10 improvements aimed at delighting you; features that quietly improve your daily experience and at the same time make the more talked about features really shine. To go with another sports analogy, I present to you the starting offensive line of Live Search Maps :-)

 1. Rolled up routes or Abbreviated Directions. I guess I don't really know what to call it, I just wonder why no one thought of it sooner. The idea here is that you are usually familiar with either the start or end of your route and don't need to take a giant printout with you of all of the steps telling you how to get from your house to the highway.  For instance, here is a route from University Gardens to Reagan Airport in DC. If you live in University Gardens, the first 9 of these 16 steps are burned into your head already and just get in the way when you're in the car. the final steps are the ones you really need and would normally be printed on a second sheet of paper. Live Search Maps now lets you 'roll up' the starting steps, greatly simplifying your route instructions as seen here and prints nicely on a single sheet of paper.

2. Improved Directions Printing. When printing your routes to take with you in the car, a number of improvements were made to improve readability as well as the instructions themselves. The most obvious are the font, color, and grouping changes but it goes much further. My favorite is the "You've gone too far if..." hint. When one person gives directions to another, its very natural to say something like "if you hit Thomas Street you went too far". As you can see in this route, Live maps is now doing the same thing, telling you "The last intersection is E Olive Way. If you reach E Thomas St, you've gone too far". Also, we've added highway shields and turn icons to the printout that are easy to see at a glance while driving.

 

 

3. Category Browsing in an Unfamiliar area. If you're traveling to a new city one of the first things you might do is enter the city name to get a map. But what next? Chances are that you want to explore the area and see what businesses are nearby. In this version of Live Maps we've added Yellow Page category browsing and put it right on the result panel after doing a location search. You can dive into the most popular yellow page categories or click 'Browse all categories' to drill in from the top of the category hierarchy. The count of businesses in each category is updated as you move around the map. For instance, after a search for Topeka, KS I selected in this link you can see I stepped all the way back to the top, then drilled into Health and Beauty -> Doctors and Clinics -> Pediatricians.

                             

4. Ghost nodes while drawing lines and shapes.  When Google came out with their implementation of Live Search Maps' Collections a few months back (known as My Maps) they added a very nifty editing feature we hadn't thought of. I liked it so much that I offered a congratulatory beer to the engineer that came up with it; an offer that was never taken up but still stands :-) We've added the feature (which I dubbed ghost node editing) to this release and made some enhancements of our own making re-shaping a line or polygon smooth like butter. In edit mode when you hover over a line segment a ghosted node appears and follows your mouse. Just click at the place you want to split the segment and drag the new node. You can reshape a polygon so quickly and accurately that it won't seem like work anymore. Another fabulous but often overlooked feature in this area is the real-time distance tooltip while drawing that lets you know how big your object is. For polygons we also show you the area of your shape when you are done editing - even for complex geometries.

5. Severe Traffic indication. We've added a 4th class of traffic speed to the overlay of traffic flow indicating a complete log jam. Previously we had green, yellow and red highlighting to indicate traffic speeds. But feedback from users was that the red category (0 to 15 mph) was too large and in fact there's a big difference in being caught in traffic that isn't moving at all versus at least rolling along at 10mph. So black was born and now indicates where you'll be completely camped out while red is at least crawling.

6. Subscribe to changes in a KML file via RSS. Earlier this year we introduced a feature to enable you to pluck an RSS feed for a Collection for use in your news reader of choice. All of the convenience of staying up to date on your favorite blogs brought to spatial data! With this release we've extended this support to KML files hosted on the web. Best of all, using it is identical to plucking a feed for a Collection. Once added to your news reader, you'll be alerted whenever the author of the original KML makes edits or additions to their  file. Best illustrated with an example. Here is a KML file showing the location of moon trees planted in the US. When the KML viewer opens you can click the subscribe button to grab its RSS feed and add it to your newsreader. [like this] behind the scenes, what is served out is the GeoRSS flavor of RSS so your KML subscription is viewable in traditional readers as well as those with explicit support for Geography! When the author adds or edits the original file, changes will show up at the top of the news feed.

7. Force Feedback with XBOX controller. If you use the XBOX controller to fly through VE3D maps, you’ll now notice that if you bump into buildings or the ground the controller vibrates. This is especially handy when you back into something.

8. Category Sensitive Details page. Each business listing at Live Search Maps has a details page that acts like a 'homepage' for the business, displaying a summary of everything we know about it. Basic address/phone number info, storefront photos, ratings & reviews, 1-click directions (party maps) and much more, all laid out in a really crisp style.  There's also a bunch of information about the business that has been crawled from the web or supplied directly to us from partners like Judy's Book and CitySearch. All together it adds up to a very exhaustive look at the business that should prove really helpful when making a choice among many options. My favorite addition to the details page is the category specific information provided by InfoUSA, Expedia, WCities and others. To view this info click the 'expand' links like the one shown here. Some of the categories that have this feature include:

• Dentists - Number of chairs, patients seen each week, Medical School...
• Hotels - direct reservation links, price range, hotel class, nearest airport code, ...
• Doctors - gender, size of practice, number of staff...
• Restaurants - average price, reservation info, outdoor seating...

 

9. Traffic sensitive routing. when you live in a congested city like LA or Seattle being able to generate driving directions that take you around the traffic can have huge benefits. We introduced real-time traffic flow overlays in Live Search Maps last year which is helpful and now we've taken it a big step further. instead of just showing you the hotspots along with a route that takes you right through them, we can now automatically route you around the traffic. In areas where we have real-time traffic information check the 'route based traffic' option as shown to the left and we'll take care of the rest.

10. Transparent Buildings. The ability to share tours of your Collections is a great new feature in this release. If your tour happens to take the viewer through one of our densely populated 3D cities chances are that some of the textured buildings will get in the camera path that you want to fly the user through. The 3D team came up with a really clever solution to this problem - buildings that find themselves in the camera's path ghost out temporarily, becoming semi-transparent as the camera approaches and flys through. its a wonderful subtle effect that greatly improves the tour experience. You can see this in the screen capture below or you can grab the full resolution video from my SkyDrive here to view it yourself.

There's more I'd like to get to, but I'll save it for a future post and keep this list to 10. Although the Gemini release is only 1 week old, we're already deep into work on the next release. We hope while you are enjoying all of the new stuff in the latest Live Search Maps that you'll take a moment to provide feedback and your wishlist for future versions. post your feedback in comments here or email me directly at SteveLom (at) microsoft d com.

Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager

Keep up with the latest Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps news at our Act Global, Search Local Blog

Software engineers tend to spend a lot more time working out at the driving range than they do the putting green. Left on our own we'd all be working on stuff like 3D Birds Eye navigation or robotic building modeling; doing a local search for a coffee shop would require first getting strapped up like this Microsoft Researcher to the right so that we could predict where you wanted to find it and if you prefer decaf. Fortunately our team is lead by a seasoned cast of veteran cat herders who continuously remind us how important it is to be creating and improving the core features you use everyday at our site - driving directions, geocoding, map navigation, local search... else you might not want to return to explore Collections and create 3D tours.

When we launched the Gemini release of Live Search Maps last week there was plenty of coverage of the new gee-wiz features like 3D modeling. Now I present to you my list of the top 10 improvements aimed at delighting you; features that quietly improve your daily experience and at the same time make the more talked about features really shine. To go with another sports analogy, I present to you the starting offensive line of Live Search Maps :-)

 1. Rolled up routes or Abbreviated Directions. I guess I don't really know what to call it, I just wonder why no one thought of it sooner. The idea here is that you are usually familiar with either the start or end of your route and don't need to take a giant printout with you of all of the steps telling you how to get from your house to the highway.  For instance, here is a route from University Gardens to Reagan Airport in DC. If you live in University Gardens, the first 9 of these 16 steps are burned into your head already and just get in the way when you're in the car. the final steps are the ones you really need and would normally be printed on a second sheet of paper. Live Search Maps now lets you 'roll up' the starting steps, greatly simplifying your route instructions as seen here and prints nicely on a single sheet of paper.

2. Improved Directions Printing. When printing your routes to take with you in the car, a number of improvements were made to improve readability as well as the instructions themselves. The most obvious are the font, color, and grouping changes but it goes much further. My favorite is the "You've gone too far if..." hint. When one person gives directions to another, its very natural to say something like "if you hit Thomas Street you went too far". As you can see in this route, Live maps is now doing the same thing, telling you "The last intersection is E Olive Way. If you reach E Thomas St, you've gone too far". Also, we've added highway shields and turn icons to the printout that are easy to see at a glance while driving.

 

 

3. Category Browsing in an Unfamiliar area. If you're traveling to a new city one of the first things you might do is enter the city name to get a map. But what next? Chances are that you want to explore the area and see what businesses are nearby. In this version of Live Maps we've added Yellow Page category browsing and put it right on the result panel after doing a location search. You can dive into the most popular yellow page categories or click 'Browse all categories' to drill in from the top of the category hierarchy. The count of businesses in each category is updated as you move around the map. For instance, after a search for Topeka, KS I selected Restaurants and then barbeque to see business listings for BBQ places. Above the results is a 'breadcrumb trail' that helps you walk back up the category hierarchy; in this link you can see I stepped all the way back to the top, then drilled into Health and Beauty -> Doctors and Clinics -> Pediatricians.

                             

4. Ghost nodes while drawing lines and shapes.  When Google came out with their implementation of Live Search Maps' Collections a few months back (known as My Maps) they added a very nifty editing feature we hadn't thought of. I liked it so much that I offered a congratulatory beer to the engineer that came up with it; an offer that was never taken up but still stands :-) We've added the feature (which I dubbed ghost node editing) to this release and made some enhancements of our own making re-shaping a line or polygon smooth like butter. In edit mode when you hover over a line segment a ghosted node appears and follows your mouse. Just click at the place you want to split the segment and drag the new node. You can reshape a polygon so quickly and accurately that it won't seem like work anymore. Another fabulous but often overlooked feature in this area is the real-time distance tooltip while drawing that lets you know how big your object is. For polygons we also show you the area of your shape when you are done editing - even for complex geometries.

5. Severe Traffic indication. We've added a 4th class of traffic speed to the overlay of traffic flow indicating a complete log jam. Previously we had green, yellow and red highlighting to indicate traffic speeds. But feedback from users was that the red category (0 to 15 mph) was too large and in fact there's a big difference in being caught in traffic that isn't moving at all versus at least rolling along at 10mph. So black was born and now indicates where you'll be completely camped out while red is at least crawling.

6. Subscribe to changes in a KML file via RSS. Earlier this year we introduced a feature to enable you to pluck an RSS feed for a Collection for use in your news reader of choice. All of the convenience of staying up to date on your favorite blogs brought to spatial data! With this release we've extended this support to KML files hosted on the web. Best of all, using it is identical to plucking a feed for a Collection. Once added to your news reader, you'll be alerted whenever the author of the original KML makes edits or additions to their  file. Best illustrated with an example. Here is a KML file showing the location of moon trees planted in the US. When the KML viewer opens you can click the subscribe button to grab its RSS feed and add it to your newsreader. [like this] behind the scenes, what is served out is the GeoRSS flavor of RSS so your KML subscription is viewable in traditional readers as well as those with explicit support for Geography! When the author adds or edits the original file, changes will show up at the top of the news feed.

7. Force Feedback with XBOX controller. If you use the XBOX controller to fly through VE3D maps, you’ll now notice that if you bump into buildings or the ground the controller vibrates. This is especially handy when you back into something.

8. Category Sensitive Details page. Each business listing at Live Search Maps has a details page that acts like a 'homepage' for the business, displaying a summary of everything we know about it. Basic address/phone number info, storefront photos, ratings & reviews, 1-click directions (party maps) and much more, all laid out in a really crisp style.  There's also a bunch of information about the business that has been crawled from the web or supplied directly to us from partners like Judy's Book and CitySearch. All together it adds up to a very exhaustive look at the business that should prove really helpful when making a choice among many options. My favorite addition to the details page is the category specific information provided by InfoUSA, Expedia, WCities and others. To view this info click the 'expand' links like the one shown here. Some of the categories that have this feature include:

• Dentists - Number of chairs, patients seen each week, Medical School...
• Hotels - direct reservation links, price range, hotel class, nearest airport code, ...
• Doctors - gender, size of practice, number of staff...
• Restaurants - average price, reservation info, outdoor seating...

 

9. Traffic sensitive routing. when you live in a congested city like LA or Seattle being able to generate driving directions that take you around the traffic can have huge benefits. We introduced real-time traffic flow overlays in Live Search Maps last year which is helpful and now we've taken it a big step further. instead of just showing you the hotspots along with a route that takes you right through them, we can now automatically route you around the traffic. In areas where we have real-time traffic information check the 'route based traffic' option as shown to the left and we'll take care of the rest.

10. Transparent Buildings. The ability to share tours of your Collections is a great new feature in this release. If your tour happens to take the viewer through one of our densely populated 3D cities chances are that some of the textured buildings will get in the camera path that you want to fly the user through. The 3D team came up with a really clever solution to this problem - buildings that find themselves in the camera's path ghost out temporarily, becoming semi-transparent as the camera approaches and flys through. its a wonderful subtle effect that greatly improves the tour experience. You can see this in the screen capture below or you can grab the full resolution video from my SkyDrive here to view it yourself.

There's more I'd like to get to, but I'll save it for a future post and keep this list to 10. Although the Gemini release is only 1 week old, we're already deep into work on the next release. We hope while you are enjoying all of the new stuff in the latest Live Search Maps that you'll take a moment to provide feedback and your wishlist for future versions. post your feedback in comments here or email me directly at SteveLom (at) microsoft d com.

Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager

Keep up with the latest Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps news at our Act Global, Search Local Blog

Continuing on with our “Do what I mean, not what I say”, blog post from last time, here are some additional categories we tackled with this initiative.

Equivalencies

“We do really badly on the query ca chp” a coworker complained in one email. 

“Ca chp?” I thought.  “What the heck does that mean?” 

It turned out it was pretty simple: “ca” was short for California and “chp” was short for California highway patrol.  Obviously, my coworker knew what he meant by the query ca chp, but I didn’t know it, and our search engine definitely didn’t know it.  After seeing many complaints from customers of this sort we began to realize that to truly improve the relevance of our search engine, it was more confirmation that we had to move past just simple keyword matching, and into understanding the intent of your query. 

So when you search for crossroads mall in OKC we take this to mean crossroads mall in Oklahoma City.  When you search for Julia child bio we’ll also look for Julia child biography to give you better results.  But of course, the same word could mean something different in another context.  Hence, when you search for nw university we we’ll search for northwestern university but if you search for nw co-ed soccer we’ll search for northwest co-ed soccer instead. 

Intelligent “stop word” retention
 
Another area that fell under the “Do what I mean, not what I say!” category were “stop words”.

What are “stop words” you ask?

Well, in Search Engine parlance they are words that oftentimes may not contain much “meaning” in the query  - words such as (a, the, in, etc…) and hence it may not be crucial as to whether they are found on the desired results page or not.   For example if the query was the aurora borealis, you probably wouldn’t be too concerned as to whether the word “the” was found on the top page returned or not, since “the” doesn’t contain much meaning here.  Hence, it may be perfectly acceptable to drop it from the query when retrieving pages.

However, if your query was The Office (the title of a popular televisions show) it would be absolutely ridiculous to drop the word “the” since the query would essentially change meaning - and we received a lot of emails about how we were doing just that.  In fact, previously we were routinely dropping all stop words – and knew this needed dramatic improvement.

In our recent release  we’ve overhauled our logic, and if you search for something where the “stop words” contain crucial meaning, we can sense thatand realize that “the” in The Office is crucial, or the “A” in Avenue A is crucial;   Whereas if you query for something like the aurora borealis we realize that the word “the” isn’t as crucial as the other query words.

Thanks, and let us know what you think!

Continuing on with our “Do what I mean, not what I say”, blog post from last time, here are some additional categories we tackled with this initiative.

Equivalencies

“We do really badly on the query ca chp” a coworker complained in one email. 

“Ca chp?” I thought.  “What the heck does that mean?” 

It turned out it was pretty simple: “ca” was short for California and “chp” was short for California highway patrol.  Obviously, my coworker knew what he meant by the query ca chp, but I didn’t know it, and our search engine definitely didn’t know it.  After seeing many complaints from customers of this sort we began to realize that to truly improve the relevance of our search engine, it was more confirmation that we had to move past just simple keyword matching, and into understanding the intent of your query. 

So when you search for crossroads mall in OKC we take this to mean crossroads mall in Oklahoma City.  When you search for Julia child bio we’ll also look for Julia child biography to give you better results.  But of course, the same word could mean something different in another context.  Hence, when you search for nw university we we’ll search for northwestern university but if you search for nw co-ed soccer we’ll search for northwest co-ed soccer instead. 

Intelligent “stop word” retention
 
Another area that fell under the “Do what I mean, not what I say!” category were “stop words”.

What are “stop words” you ask?

Well, in Search Engine parlance they are words that oftentimes may not contain much “meaning” in the query  - words such as (a, the, in, etc…) and hence it may not be crucial as to whether they are found on the desired results page or not.   For example if the query was the aurora borealis, you probably wouldn’t be too concerned as to whether the word “the” was found on the top page returned or not, since “the” doesn’t contain much meaning here.  Hence, it may be perfectly acceptable to drop it from the query when retrieving pages.

However, if your query was The Office (the title of a popular televisions show) it would be absolutely ridiculous to drop the word “the” since the query would essentially change meaning - and we received a lot of emails about how we were doing just that.  In fact, previously we were routinely dropping all stop words – and knew this needed dramatic improvement.

In our recent release  we’ve overhauled our logic, and if you search for something where the “stop words” contain crucial meaning, we can sense thatand realize that “the” in The Office is crucial, or the “A” in Avenue A is crucial;   Whereas if you query for something like the aurora borealis we realize that the word “the” isn’t as crucial as the other query words.

Thanks, and let us know what you think!

One of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center’s (MMPC) goals is to share the valuable data, insights and expertise we have with customers on a regular basis in an effort to help customers better understand the changes occurring in the threat landscape and improve their defenses accordingly.  We just released the third volume of our threat report, called the Security Intelligence Report (SIR). The SIR shares the conclusions drawn by our research team using data gathered from the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), Windows Defender, Windows Live OneCare, Windows Live OneCare safety scanner, Exchange Hosted Services, and Forefront Client Security (FCS).  The net of this, is threat related data from several hundred million Windows based systems.

The MMPC partners with several groups within Microsoft to make the SIR a unique threat report.  The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), the Trustworthy Computing (TwC) group and numerous product groups all contribute to the report.  In this volume of the SIR, the MSRC has written a couple of sections on software vulnerability disclosures and exploits.  Here’s an example of one observation by the MSRC:  The number of disclosed vulnerabilities across the software industry continues to climb, with more than 3,400 new vulnerabilities disclosed in 1H07. But according to the  data we’ve gathered this number actually represents a decrease from 2H06, the first period-to-period decline in total vulnerabilities since 2003.  Another trend identified by the MSRC is that while the number of vulnerabilities continues to increase, the ratio of exploit code available for those vulnerabilities is on a slight decline.

We have been listening to feedback from customers, partners and analysts regarding what they liked in past releases of the SIR and what they thought could be improved.  Based on that feedback we have made some big changes in this new volume of the SIR that I hope readers will like.  Please keep the feedback coming!  Some of the changes we made in the new SIR include:

·         The report includes a new section on Software Vulnerability Exploits, which is authored by the MSRC. 

·         The report now has a new look and feel which includes an executive summary as well as customer guidance (strategies, mitigations, and countermeasures) in each section of the report

·         A ten page “Key Findings Summary” is also available which provides an executive summary of the 92 page SIR.  This summary is available in the following languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish

·         From the data in the SIR we can see that the trends continue in a direction that indicates attackers are financially motivated and are adjusting their tactics along with constantly modifying the threats, both malicious and potentially unwanted (you can read more about what distinguishes each of these in the report)  they use to support this goal.  Some examples of findings in the new SIR:< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

·         Significant increases in categories, such as Trojan downloaders, potentially unwanted software (which includes rogue security software), and exploits, suggest that distribution of potentially unwanted software is less and less a matter of a normal affiliate model and more often malicious and/or criminal in method and intent.

·         The MSRT removed significantly more malware in 1H07 than in previous periods.  It removed malware from 1 out of every 217 computers in 1H07, compared to 1:409 in 2006 and 1:359 in 2H05.

·         We found 65% less Potentially Unwanted Software and 60% less malware on computers running Windows Vista than on computers running Windows XP SP2.

 

You can read more in the SIR: www.microsoft.com/sir

Thanks,

Vinny Gullotto

Paul McDonald just announced the new Blogger JavaScript client library over on the Google Data APIs Blog:

The Blogger GData JS Client library enables developers to read and write blog posts using calls to our JavaScript library. This is a full client library, with support for authenticated access to private data and read-write capabilities. Now you can create Blogger applications and mashups that can read and write data from your Blogger blogs. No server-side programming is required. Your application can run on any domain, too. No proxying is required.

We have a new developer guide for JavaScript and some code samples to give you ideas and get you started.