Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth have both received an update, and the …

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2008 has been a significant one for Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth; Microsoft has been rolling out updates and improvements like no tomorrow, and with positive results. Apparently the software giant didn't want to leave out September from its month of pushing out new features for its mapping service, and now it's time to see the latest the company has implemented.

Multi-Point Directions: driving directions can now have multiple points and don't have to be limited to getting from point A to point B. A single set of directions can be generated for a trip going to multiple locations.

Landmark Hints: also for driving directions, key locations now tell the user additional visual data (turn at gas station, or if you see a Starbucks you've gone too far). This feature is currently only for North America and encompasses gas stations, major national chains, hotels, restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, and car dealerships.

Community-submitted collections: now indexed immediately after upload and can be searched seconds after they are created. Also, collections data is used to help in "business" search results for search criteria where limited or no business listings exist.

Related searches: results can now be refined further through filters that become available based on what you search for. Related categories and neighborhoods now include result counts.

Details page: it has moved from a tabbed model to an inline layout, allowing for more content to be exposed. User reviews are now shown on a "scorecard," which presents the data in categories that can then be used to dig further into what users have said about a particular aspect of a location.

Geocoding: queries for international locations has been improved, and high-precision geocoding has been increased. Address geocoding for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy has been improved, with dramatic improvements in unstructured match rates.

Localized Tiles: across Western Europe, updated map tiles provide the place names in the local language (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish).

Live Search Maps received improvements specific to imagery processing and rendering, including road tiles, bird's eye scenes, and vector data. Roads and postal codes for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific have also been updated with April 2008 data from TeleAtlas, Navteq, and Map Data Sciences. My favorite from all these updates has to be the multi-point directions, as I always found the lack of this feature very frustrating. For Virtual Earth (VE), the following has been updated in version 6.2:

14 different types of clouds are rendered based on real-time weather. This is updated every three hours, with the update date/time displayed at the bottom right of the screen.

Mobile support: mobile applications can now be developed with Virtual Earth, which offers more features and enhancements to support mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile, RIM's Blackberry, and Apple's iPhone.

Richer data: the ability to zoom in on a map to better visualize a cluster of points, VE now supports rooftop geocodes for 85 million unique addresses, customers can find locations using alternate and similar spellings, and users can find out the relative age of a given image (which will help them assess if the imagery is still relevant to their needs).

Future VE 3D releases will be delivered through Microsoft Update, making it easier for customers to receive functional updates to the 3D client code automatically.