As part of our ongoing collaborations with product groups around Microsoft, Live Labs continues to help other teams improve features and add new capabilities to Microsoft's online services.  Recently, with the fall release of Live Search, our work with the Maps team paid off for users.  We worked closely with the team in developing two key improvements:

Single Box Search

Using Live Labs' entity extraction technology, a machine learning algorithm for classifying data, the Local Search team was able to combine the two boxes used for separately entering a business name and a location into a single search box. 

A much anticipated feature, it enables maps.live.com users to enter single queries without having to negotiate multiple input boxes such as:

• Philadelphia, to just jump to a map of the city;
• Chowder in Boston, MA, to search for some comfort food by the bay; or
• Chinese Food to search the current map area (or our estimate for your location if it is a new session) for some lo mein.

Bird's Eye in 3D

Both the 3D and Bird's Eye views in maps.live.com provide unique and valuable ways to look at the world, providing far more detail and more useful information than straight down aerial views alone can.  Until now, you had to switch back and forth between the 3D client and the Ajax version to see Bird's Eye Imagery.  Now, with a user experience reminiscent of Photosynth, the Virtual Earth 3D experience let's you see bird's eye images right in context, including a preview of the perspective of surrounding images with that familiar white outline:

Check out the newest version of Live Search Maps for these and many more great enhancements.  This type of ongoing collaboration with groups around Microsoft is what Live Labs is all about; stay tuned for many more improvements like this.