Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform is continually gaining popularity, not only from the perspective of increased audience as from additional heavyweight players on the online world ready to embrace it. The latest example in this context is Ask.com. Ask Maps, Business Search (City), Smart Answers (Web Search), and Smart Answers - Movies (Web Search) from Ask.comn are all powered by Microsoft's Virtual Earth, according to Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist Microsoft.

"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)," Pendleton confirmed.

At least on the U.S. market, Aks.com is one of the top search players outside of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and the inclusion of Virtual Earth among its services will undoubtedly benefit the Redmond giant's platform. Of course that Ask.com is not the sole company to flirt with Microsoft and Virtual Earth, and this is a clear indication of the fact that the work done by the Redmond company is to offer much more than a mapping, location, imagery and search service.

Virtual Earth is, in this regard, first and foremost a platform enabling developers to build solutions on top of it. And Virtual Earth's expansion comes in more shapes than one as Microsoft's Ian Moulster explained pointing to the integration of Bird's Eye imagery into Multimap.

"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, Superpages, and WhitePages 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," Pendleton added.