When news came out that Microsoft UK was readying ads with the first being about directions to Euston Station the steakdigital.co.uk blog was quick to note that Bing didn’t really do well at providing directions to the station, as seen below.

However today, following the airing of Bing’s first UK TV ads, when I did the same search Bing yields a much better result.

I was intrigued by this and wondered if its just large stations that have been given new map features as the top result. My findings showed that medium sized stations such as Bristol Parkway also have the new maps added to the front page when searching for directions.

I decided to have a look for small stations but unfortunately they don’t yet appear to have the map feature, when searching for “directions to Stonehouse” the map shown was actually for the town and not the station, as one would expect. I could not find any search, such as “directions to Stonehouse Station”, returning a page with the map feature, the second site displayed did contain directions.

I was again intrigued by map feature on the front page of the direction search and did another search, this time for my home town of Berkeley which has about 1500 inhabitants and was surprised that this small town has a map.

Yes, after the map the links are not very useful when searching the UK, I’m unlikely to want the US Berkeley, however for nearly every search in the UK the map will provide enough info for someone to get to Berkeley. Following this I wondered how useful the Google UK page was when searching “directions to Berkeley” and suffice to say its useless.

As you can see all of the links on this page are for the US despite searching through Google UK.

Some things are still lacking from this maps feature though, I was expecting to be shown a map of Bristol when searching for “directions to Bristol Airport”, but when searching for sports grounds, such as Bristol City’s Ashton Gate (I’m not a fan of football but my brother and dad are huge fans) a map was shown; even searching for “directions to Berkeley Castle” returns a map.

There is still work to be done here, but as far as I can tell its better than Google’s implementation of shows using where something is. I wonder what the other 2 Bing UK ads will be focussed around and if we can expect some new features to be added when they air.