Microsoft launches Bing (sans beta tag) and Bing Maps in UK

[UK] Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering. At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com.

The daily Bing homepage will now be featuring UK-specific imagery and hotspots, and Microsoft claims the localized search engine will boast better ‘instant answers’ (e.g. “how is Liverpool doing in the Premiership?”). Other Bing features like Visual Search and Bing Twitter Search are integrated, but the company has also set up a partnership with Ciao UK to deliver a custom, localized shopping experience.

Microsoft is going to redirect visitors of Bing.com/maps to a specific Bing Maps UK service now instead of opening Multimap.com, and visitors of the latter site will get asked to switch to the newly launched site as well in the next couple of weeks. There are a slew of new features that were added to Bing Maps for the UK site, so for a full overview the best thing for you to do is check out this blog post, where all of them are listed.

TC Europe readers in the UK, your thoughts?