Microsoft and Google have been battling with mapping software just as much as they are battling with search. Microsoft upped the game by adding "birds eye views" with incredible detail. Google responded with "street view." I saw something tonight that tells me Microsoft will lose.

I'm planning a family vacation to Disney World and I wanted to find the Animal Kingdom Lodge on a map. First stop was Google Maps. I typed "animal kingdom lodge" and the first search result was "Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge, Orlando, FL" and was exactly what I was looking for. One-click and the hotel shows up on the map. While I like Google's imagery they didn't have a street view available for this location yet so I thought I'd check out Microsoft to see if they had a nice close arial view.

That's where the fun stopped. I had to remember that Microsoft is trying to brand their online services under Live.com so I jumped to maps.live.com. By the way, I hadn't worried about the fact that I'm currently using the Safari browser on the Mac until just after I punched in the URL. Live.com decided that I must have meant that I wanted to try international local search, not maps. Okay, maybe I got the URL wrong. I jump to www.live.com and click the "maps" button. Same thing. Okay, maybe the map software has changed and I need to type in a location first. "Animal Kingdom Lodge" resulted in "Location Unknown." Hmmm... Here's where it dawned on me that maybe it was the web browser.

I fired up Firefox and head to maps.live.com where I see the mapping screen I expected to see from Safari. Okay... "Animal Kingdom Lodge" in the search box. "There are no business results for animal kingdom lodge." That's odd. Oh, I must need to use the "location" search type instead. Take a look at the results from that search:

Finally, out of frustration I punched in "Orlando, FL" and actually get the map zoomed in on the city. Now I search for "animal kingdom lodge." Same crappy results. This time I have to switch BACK to "business" search before I actually get the result I want.

Microsoft is going to lose the map wars fast. Google doesn't have "business","people","collections" and "locations" search types on it's maps. It just has a search box that works. Google was smart enough to know that "Animal Kingdom Lodge" is the name of a very popular hotel at the very popular Disney World in Orlando, FL. Google was smart enough to search everything when I had a map of the entire United States and didn't force me to select a city before returning useful results.

If Microsoft can't find Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge on a map of the United States I certainly think they've lost the map wars and it doesn't say much about their chances of winning in search.