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:
Business Search (City):
Smart Answers (Web Search):
Smart Answers - Movies (Web Search):
Of course, they've included Bird's Eye:
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
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Search England Land reports that Ask.com has dropped its homegrown mapping app (built on deCarta, if memory serves) and switched to Microsoft Virtual Earth. Story and pics at Virtual Earth, Evangelist blog.
Google added walking directions to its Google Maps product today. The walking directions ignore one-way streets and Google Maps tries to give pedestrians the most direct and flat route possible. As Google itself acknowledges, the Maps database does not