MSN Offers a Virtual Earth

MSN's Virtual Earth is now out of beta. You can read their 'blog post about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/07/25/443118.aspx and see the service itself at http://virtualearth.msn.com .

You can search by keyword or you can start by plugging in an address. If I'm going to view a map site I usually go for plugging in an address. So I do that, and get a map that zooms in much closer than Google Maps. There's a satellite and a regular map view, though the satellite view has the street names marked on it. (A little button by the Aerial view toggle lets you turn the labels on and off.)

There was some oddness. Sometimes I would zoom and couldn't get very close zoom-ins -- and this was in metro areas where you would expect otherwise. Virtual Earth puts icons by the addresses you choose, and sometimes they were odd. For one address I entered, the marking icon was several houses away, a good block from the actual address I was looking at.

I looked for a Burger King in Walla Walla Washington. There's one at 1748 E Isaacs Ave, Walla Walla, WA, so I zoomed in on that. I couldn't zoom all the way in, but could get close enough to make out the building and get a good sense of where it was in relation to other streets.

There were some things I liked about Virtual Earth. I liked the scratch pad -- a floating box that keeps track of your last few lookups. I liked searching for keywords and getting the labeled satellite photo of stores matching my keyword. I liked the named streets in the satellite photos (which is something Google Maps has begun offering recently.)

But there were things I didn't like. I didn't like the inconsistentcy of the photos -- sometimes they were color, sometimes not. What gives? I didn't like the horizontal zooming tool -- it just didn't feel as precise as the vertical notched tool at Google Maps. And like I said earlier, sometimes the icon positioning seemed wonky. Despite that, Virtual Earth is worth a look. Who knew that there were going to be online mapping service wars along with search wars?

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