Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has added satellite images from its Virtual Earth online mapping  service to the software giant's search engine Live Search, as a new feature of its image searching system, the company announced late Friday. Live Search, the third most-used search engine in the United States and the fourth globally according to research from Web traffic measurement company comScore, now shows users looking for images detailed satellite photos of major cities and popular landmarks in the U.S. such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Statute of Liberty and White House. Microsoft Aims For Large Photo Mapping "Mashup" Microsoft said the new addition to its Image Search function could become "the most gigantic photo mapping mashup ever," allowing searchers to find satellite imagery alongside traditional image results, according to Microsoft Virtual Earth technical evangelist Chris Pendleton who announced the new feature in a Friday message posted to the company's Virtual Earth blog. "For points of interest such as Space Needle, Statue of Liberty or Pacific Beach, you'll get a Bird's Eye image of the respective location," Pendleton said in the Friday message. An image search for San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Bridge brought the Web surfer directly to a page dominated by a large interactive bird's eye view of the structure, with the first of some 63,000-plus still images shown below and a list of suggested related searches displayed on the right of the screen. A SearchEngineWorld example image below shows the Golden Gate Bridge satellite image above the traditional Live Search image results.  The satellite images embedded within Live Search's image searching pages offer most of the view options as available in the dedicated Microsoft Virtual Earth service, including road and aerial layouts and both two and three dimensional displays in addition to the default overhead bird's eye vantage point. The new Image Search feature was also able to display additional satellite images for landmarks in certain locations, even when no overhead imagery is shown for an initial search. An image search for Chicago, for example, did not show a satellite photo among the primary results, however a new "Show Map" link appeared above the images, which when clicked led to an interactive map showing thumbnail versions of nine landmarks that were linked to bird's eye views, such as the Wrigley Field baseball park, Navy Pier, and Sears Tower. Microsoft Live Image Search Taps Virtual Earth Satellite Views "If you don't see a Bird's Eye image and you're searching through a major city you still may have the opportunity to map out certain pictures in the result set that have been geospatially annotated and placed onto an overview map," Pendleton said. "If this is the case, you'll see normal image search results, but at the top of the result list is a link for 'Show Map'," Pendleton added. Microsoft has made the new feature optional for those who don't want to view satellite imagery within their images searches. An option to hide the new map information was included, essentially toggling the new feature on and off, although it appeared to lack the ability to permanently choose whether to show the new satellite images, making it necessary to manually click to hide each landmark for which a bird's eye view is available. Earlier this year Microsoft added mobile access to its Virtual Earth service through an upgrade to the company's Windows Mobile operating system, and this month the world's biggest software maker signed an agreement with satellite imaging firm DigitalGlobe to provide higher resolution images for Virtual Earth. In August Google signed a similar deal with satellite imagery company GeoEye. On Monday Microsoft rival Google unveiled a version of its satellite mapping application, Google Earth, for the Apple iPhone. Related Links :
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