Virtual Earth is often the recipient of monster-size multi-Terabyte updates containing new imagery, be it Orthos, satellite or Bird's Eye. But at the same time, Virtual Earth is just a smaller piece of the puzzle for Microsoft, which offers a complex platform covering an array of aspects from mapping to location and even search. Well, the fact is that not only Virtual Earth is continually evolving, but also other pieces of the platform, and an illustrative example in this context is Live Search Maps.

"Another big day for Virtual Earth in the portal space. Granted, it's our own search portals but it's great to see the platform getting more use and exposure worldwide," stated Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist. Live Search Maps has, in fact, grown internationally, as Pendleton put it.

First off, the Redmond company was hard at work preparing for the Beijing 2008 Olympic games. In this context, Microsoft has expanded Live Search Maps China in order to include content related to the Olympics. Obviously, Beijing is going to experience a strong influx of visitors both in the real world and online, and Microsoft is simply attempting to stay ahead of the wave.

"The Live Search Maps China site (or DITU) has the following additions and improvements: real-time Traffic in Beijing; send-to-mobile for free for local search and transit routing result; transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic); expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities; geocoding and Local Search; data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues; support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage; Olympic query relevance improvement; local search category refinement; map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc. and expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now," Pendleton added.

But while the main focus of the Live Search Maps update seems to have been China, Microsoft debuted the Live Search Maps Australia website. The Australian specific website comes as Microsoft has just added Bird's Eye content for the continent down under. Now, in addition to extra imagery via Virtual Earth, Australians will also be able to access information from NineMSN and Yellow (Pages).