More Geo Info from Virtual Earth

Microsoft announces that they will be updating the aerial imagery in Live Local. Over 400,000 square miles of U.S. aerial imagery are supposed to "enhanced with high-resolution coverage." Interestingly, Greg Sterling notes that the imagery provider, GlobeXplorer, "was acquired by DigitalGlobe, which is one of the primary providers of imagery for Google Earth." That may cause some shifting of source data among the various geographic search engines in the future.

And by the way, back in December, Live Local had a "minor point release." The "minor" release came with a variety of feature changes including improvements to the Bird's Eye View navigation and the ability to measure distances between points. The Bird's Eye View navigation now uses an inset map for easier moving around an area. Use the drawing tools to sketch a route and then look at the scratchpad for the distance. A bit later in December, Italian aerial imagery and more 3D cities (Minneapolis, St. Paul, Tacoma, Irving (TX), Sacramento, and more greater Los Angeles) were added. Live Local has some very useful features for anyone searching for certain details in map and aerial imagery searching. Greg's post also notes that market share for MapQuest, Google Maps, and Yahoo! Maps, presumably the top three. Yet both Ask Maps and Live Local have some unique features and can have different data. In my own searching, I find it depends on the location as to what quality of data is available. And it varies as to which geo search engine has the more details and/or up-to-date data.