Bing Maps China has updated their site with tons of new data and some new features:

• Yellow Pages – Over 8 million yellow page listings are now searching from Bing Maps China.
• Business Photos – Hundreds of thousands of business front photos are now available as a part of our YP listings results.
• Transit – Bing Maps China has had transit information for a while now; however, the site now hosts hundreds of transit lines around China
• Road Data Refresh – Updated the entire country with new road network data inclusive of over 4 million road segments
• Traffic – Higher fidelity, wider coverage traffic flow information for more roads around the country
• Performance Enhancements – Route and transit calculation times cut by over 50%
• Signposts (Directions) – visual improvements for driving directions
• Signposts (Highway Exits) - visual improvements for highway exit signs
• Signposts (Border Crossing) - visual improvements for border crossing signs

The Bing Maps China API SDK has also been updated.

One sure fire way to get a new feature noticed is to attach it to TechCrunch, and indeed TC noticed a new Bing feature yesterday that appears on Bing search results for “TechCrunch”:

The “Latest posts” feature only appears for certain websites (TechCrunch, New York Times, etc), and appears to be different than the “Top Headlines” feature that shows not the latest headlines, but perhaps the most popular ones?

In the screenshot above you can see that a search on “New York Times” shows both lists, with the “latest posts” showing results from minutes or hours ago, and “Top headlines” showing results filtered by something other than time.

We don’t have “Latest posts” showing up on a search for “LiveSide” (hey!, what’s up with that?) and it seems to be kind of hit or miss as to who has the new feature at this point, but it seems like it could be quite useful.  We’ll keep an eye on it.

Bing UK is no longer in beta, it just shed its beta tag. So now when you search for football you won’t get NFL schedules but Football results (Americans call what we call football soccer), providing you do use the UK Bing page of course.
 
Some of the great features for Bing users in the UK are:

• The daily Bing Homepage image and hotspots are something that now will be localized in the UK, with unique imagery and hotspots.
• Visual Search using visual images and metadata to make search more visual and more compelling.
• More Instant Answers. Get quick response answers and results to searches, such as how is Liverpool doing in the Premiership or which tourist attraction should I take my in-laws to at the weekend?
• See who or what is being chatted about real-time with a global live Twitter feed with Bing Twitter search.
• Looking for the best deals?  - There is now an integrated shopping experience with Ciao UK. With Bing you can search the Internet to find the best prices, reviews and local availability. 
• With insights from our Multimap users, Bing Maps now offers new map styles, imagery and transit integration as well as draggable routes.
• Bing has been built for the UK to help consumers get to key local sites and services in fewer links by including popular links, search boxes and suggestions within best match.

Not only did Bing shed its beta tag in the UK, Bing Maps UK was also released. You may have already noticed this when we notified you about a new Bing Maps Interface. This means that if you are in the UK and go to Bing Maps via Bing.com/maps you will get the new Bing Maps Experience, not what you were used to from Multimap.com. However, if you want to, you can still access that via Multimap.com. Afraid you’ll miss out if you use that one? Don’t be! In the next few weeks you will be asked if you’d like to try the new Bing maps experience.

Here are the features of Bing Maps UK (some shared with US market):

• Redesigned Navigation – An updated navigation bar that matches up with that of Bing Maps US
• Default Search: Location – Default search queries are set to location instead of business
• Collins Bartholomew Maps – The popular and well-known A-to-Z style maps
• Ordnance Survey Maps – Maps for the outdoorsman (or outdoorswoman)!
• Public Transportation Station Symbology – Symbols representing the different types of public transit are now clearly marked on the map.
• Tube Maps – Clicking on one of the stations brings up the Tube Maps for the respective station and the stations it connects to; however, you can turn on all Tube Maps by clicking the respective link in the Welcome Panel.
• Nearby Stations – Certain location query types, such as “EC4a 2dy” will result in a pin on the map, as well as a popup providing the closest stations to the respective location and how far away they are. Also including in the results are links to Directions, Saving the pushpin to My Places and Emailing a link to a friend.
• What’s Nearby – Also in location results, the Welcome Panel will pop out and provide you with a list of business types that are around the respective area. These will be business categories that reside within the area. Also, notice the link to Explore Wikipedia information right inside of Bing Maps.
• Explore User Contributions – If you want to see what other people have contributed (not only to Wikipedia that is now being pulled into Bing Maps), you can explore Collection Items with Photos, 3D Models, MapCruncher Layers and Photosynths (contributed via Photosynth.com). These are available via the Explore option in the Welcome menu.
• Walking Directions 
• London Congestion Charge Warnings – London has a system using cameras to charge you for passing through a sort of toll area. These areas will now be identified within your route instructions on Bing Maps. Don’t want to pay the charge? Use the draggable maps option to drag a route around the area.
• Draggable Routes – If you need to change your route you can either enter an additional location in the Route Planner or just grab the route with your mouse cursor and drag it to where you want to go. This will regenerate the route for you.
• New Popup Behaviors – Popups are now activated via mouse-click, rather than mouse hover. They also remain raised if you move the mouse away. Close them via the close symbol, clicking on another pushpin, or clicking on the base map.
• Embeddable Maps - You can now take a map view right from Bing Maps and embed it into your site. To do this, you’ll want to click the Share button once your map is where you want it to be. You can copy the embed code from there; or, you can click the Customize View link which will take you to the embeddable map customizer (EMC).
• Function Buttons
  

That’s quite a list! For a more detailed explanation and images check out Chris Pendleton’s post at the Search Blog.

Want to check if you found every change in Bing maps in other countries? Check out this list.

Hot on the heels of the updates to Bing Maps, Videos, and Reference, Bing made some more announcements today, as part of a “major release”, to be rolled out over the coming weeks.  Most noticeable is the announcement of a partnership with Wolfram|Alpha to use their APIs and include nutritional information searches and math searches as part of Bing.  From the Wolfram|Alpha blog:

Having announced the Wolfram|Alpha API just over three weeks ago, I am pleased to share in announcing Microsoft’s Bing decision engine as one of our first API customers.

Starting today, Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing’s results in select areas across nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Wolfram|Alpha provides immediate, unbiased, and individualized information, making it distinctly different from what has traditionally been found through web search. By using Wolfram|Alpha, Bing recognizes the complementary benefits of bringing computational knowledge to the forefront of the search experience.

By using our API, Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from Wolfram|Alpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results.

But there’s much more to the new release, including expanded weather coverage for select cities, an improved Bing Shopping experience, and “the next generation of Hover Preview, which lets people view a snapshot of a website or search within that website before clicking through”.  You can get a preview of what’s to come at “Behind Bing”, which has insights into many of the new features:

The new Bing Videos site looks to be a big improvement over its predecessor MSN Video – with Silverlight Streaming, a new cleaner look, and integration with YouTube, Hulu, National Geographic, and many more.  But like many others, we’ve been wondering why Bing?  Why not revamp the MSN site (video.msn.com, which now redirects to Bing.com/videos/browse)?

Of course one answer is that gathering video from across partner (and other) websites might be inappropriate on a content site like MSN, where you would expect the content to be original (and indeed there will still be original video content coming out of MSN, but still surfacing on Bing videos).  But on Bing, rather than navigating to a video on a site, you’re actually searching for content, albeit in a highly controlled way.

Clicking on one of the subcategories on Bing.com/videos, say Music Video, returns:

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=browse:Music&FORM=V0VR14,

which as you can see is a search result.  Further, clicking on one of the videos under that result, say Aerosmith – Crazy, returns yet another search result:

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=browse:Music\All\TopCollections\Aerosmith&docid=1086302847240&mid=BD70E3778A7E41B34B7B3BAE0DB1BDFC68D02EA6&FORM=LKVR3#

• (Note that on the Bing.com/videos/browse page, clicking on a video to play in the player (the one with the nice “dim lights” feature) offers up a slightly different url:
• http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/time-lapse-shows-melting-arctic-ice/1abx6337t,
• and we’re not sure if this would be counted as a search result or not, but it certainly would count as time spent on Bing)

How smart is this?  With Bing Videos, Microsoft has built a site that is engaging, clean, offers up great content, and perhaps most importantly for Bing and Microsoft, has the potential to (perhaps significantly?) increase search market share and time spent on Bing.

This month’s, 178,720 square kilometers worth, early image release is focused on Europe, mostly Eastern Europe:

• Bulgaria (1,225 sq. km)
• Czech Republic (10,808 sq. km)
• Estonia (1,418 sq. km)
• Hungary (23,840 sq. km)
• Latvia (12,763 sq. km)
• Lithuania (9,681 sq. km)
• Poland (24,912 sq. km)
• Romania (24,435 sq. km)
• Russian Federation (15,636 sq. km)
• Slovakia (2,018 sq. km)
• Slovenia (314 sq. km)
• Switzerland (6,227 sq. km)
• Turkey (45,443 sq. km)

Check out the full details on the Bing Maps World Tour Application.

Bing Maps Imagery Release, November 2009 - Bing Maps Blog