MSN launches local search today. You can check it out at:
You don’t need to worry about memorizing this odd URL though. A “Local” tab is available at http://search.msn.com.
It looks like a good first step. The aerial photos aren’t so hot–at least in the Phoenix area they are a bit blury with poor contrast and panning stutters–but the search results are reasonable.
I’ll be trying it out over the coming days. Maybe Google will still win out, but only trying it out for real will tell.
One feature I like in Google better is that I can write in an address while in the local.google.com mode and it won’t force me into a separate map mode. I can seemlessly swap back and forth between looking for a restaurant and addresses that I know.
So what could MSN provide that would make me switch? One feature I’d like to see is integrated driving and parking directions. This is particularly a big deal for me when driving into a downtown area.
Similarly, when I travel to conferences one of my first questions is how do I get from the airport and how can I use the public transportation to get from point A to point B? What shuttle buses are there? How much might a taxi ride be? There’s lots of money revolving around these types of travel issues. It could be quite lucrative if one of the search engines could help serve this market better.