Ask Maps Now Using Virtual Earth

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image Ask.com has migrated off of their mapping platform and onto Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform. If you navigate to maps.ask.com you will now see Virtual Earth (or MapPoint Web Service for those who don't have supported browsers or JavaScript is disabled).

Virtual Earth has been initially inserted into quite a few of the Ask offerings:

Ask Maps:

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Business Search (City):

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Smart Answers (Web Search):

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Smart Answers - Movies (Web Search):

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Of course, they've included Bird's Eye:

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Ask follows suit of many portal sites to letting Microsoft make the investments in infrastructure, imagery / photography acquisition, data updates, etc., etc., etc. The list includes the likes of YellowPages.com, Superpages.com, and WhitePages.com to name a few. Allowing us to do the heavy lifting in building out a robust mapping platform allows customers to focus on developing applications that benefit end users.

CP