Google Earth has been available for the past few days for download (although temporarily put on hold). It is quite an impressive program (it's a 10mb file) - and streams the content it requires as you view different parts of the world. You can rotate, zoon and even tilt the map which is really quite amazing to look at, it gives the impression of 3d even though it's a flat 2d map.

Previously open to those with invites only - Yahoo 360 is now open to all. Much like Microsoft's Wallop (which is still invite only) Yahoo 360 allows you to share your thoughts, photos, music and more between a grouped network of friends.

MSN Have introduced something called Neural Net Technology to try to improve MSN search results. Microsoft posted an article about this in their blog. Around this time they also updated their search results.

MSN Search now has some advanced searching commands - these now include;
inanchor: - This command allows you to search the anchor text of links
intitle: - Allows you to search the title tag of any page. For example you could search for all pages containing the phrase bmw 330.
filetype: -Filters the search results to only show you results matching the filetype specified here. For example filetype:doc will lists just document (.doc) files.
linkdomain: - This search all the links pointing to a specified site, what makes this different from the standard link function is that you can view all links to a domain even deep links. As far as I'm aware only Yahoo had this function up until now.
Contains: - Returns all documents which contain links to the filetype specified.

For more information about Neural Networks read this document. There is also an interesting document entitled Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent by a Microsoft Researcher called Chris Burges.

It seems the satellite imaginary at Google Maps now covers major towns in the UK including London at high detail from what I've seen. It also covers Rome, Athens and Barcelona in high detail. I will definitely explorer this some more when I get a chance!

Andy Hagans and Patrick Gavin (of the popular link broker site - Text Link Ads) have set-up their own Blog called Link Building Blog. From what I've read it seems to have great articles, definitely one I will to returning to frequently.

Microsoft have just released MSN Local Search. By clicking the local tab on the MSN homepage you can test this new service (currently in its beta stage). The service allows you on type on a service or product you want to find, for example "book store". When you click "local" is then lists the top 10 stores (labelled A-J) in order of distance.

For each listing it provides business name, address, phone number, distance and even directions. All this is nicely displayed on a map (see below on my rather small screen capture). The maps are quite basic but do allow you to zoom in/out and pan without reloading the entire page (much like Google Maps without the scrolling.)



You location can be altered in the settings screens in case it is incorrect first time - unfortunately I couldn't get it to work of UK results I had to move my location to the US to get results like one screen shown above. Microsoft are currently working on Virtual Earth to directly take on Google Maps later this year.