Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has been providing an excellent airline ticket search function, had a yet another launch of a new feature on Thursday. This feature would offer interior maps of 42 American airports. Looking at the design, it can be said that it is a very clever make as one can get to the maps by entering the airport’s name and the feature would search the query via Bing Maps. Travelers might appreciate this addition as Bing even allows its query-makers to search for their flight status. In this case, Bing links the site to an airport map for the user. One can check out the full list of available airport maps over at Bing Travel.
In most of the cases, veteran business travelers have decent knowledge about the most-visited airports around them, but they might be in a fix, when they visit an unknown territory and have no knowledge about the airports nearby. In such a situation, this feature can be a boon for such travelers. One can even sort out airport stores and kiosks by business type, or the level on which they’re located. There is even an inclusion of information on parking, ticket counters, baggage claims, currency exchange and more.
Bing’s biggest competitor, Google even offers airport maps, but as it was noted by TechCrunch, Google has not been able to provide users with complete information. Bing has worked on the prospects which Google missed out on and has included the check-in counters and restaurants you can now find. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch has a statement to argue as she says, “Google has been moving into the indoor mapping space, even going so far as to provide Street View shots inside businesses for Google Business Photos. That it would soon start providing a version of Street View for airports would not be surprising.”
However, as for now, Bing has taken the initiative and has the upper hand in this case. Bing seems like a good place to find this sort of information.
Once again, competition between search engines have resulted in improving user experience and usability. These search engines have been competing with one another to acquire, organize, and index increasingly obscure (but still-useful) data sets.
Google has opted for a number of successful strategies, which has been helpful to keep itself at the top spot. But for users, to switch over from one search engine to another is free-of-cost and this would be what might still force Google to innovate further and keep users from switching over to other search engines. Bing on its part has been doing each and every thing possible to better its search market share. And it seems it would further innovate with features, where Google has not been able to provide the required service.
Talking about this new feature, it may be useful to many users, but some still fear that this feature can even be used by someone with wrong intentions, like terrorists. They can look to target airports with the use of this online maps instead of scouting out the locations ahead of time.