I am working on a new application and I will make use of a mapping API from one of the search engines. In researching the different maps and their respective API’s, I was disappointed to find out that ask.com doesn’t have an API for their maps. Ask seems to have the best satellite data for my application, which is focused on rural areas, but alas, I can’t make use of it. I understand that it takes significant amount of work and resources to produce an API that can withstand the demands of thousands of external applications. Seeing how much money ask.com has spent on advertising recently, I think they would get a better bang for their buck on a map API than on commercials. Matt Cutts posted a graph from Alexa that indicates they didn’t receive a traffic spike from the commercials. Think about the boost they would get if thousands of mashups are created using Ask’s maps. First, people would become accustomed to using the interface and familiarity begets use. Secondly, a portion of those applications would send traffic directly to Ask maps (driving directions, etc..), making them more likely to use the Ask search engine in the future. So how about Ask, where is the API?