United Kingdom based provider of mapping and location-based services, Multimap.com, was acquired by Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday. Microsoft said it wants to use the company's resources to expand its location-based search engine and advertising platforms.

Multimap.com, which has been running since 1996, offers street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; and local information. Their website is one of Europe's most popular mapping Web sites, receiving more than 10 million users each month.

"This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally," said Sharon Baylay, general manager at Microsoft's Online Services Group.

Multimap.com also provides mapping services for web sites. These mapping services include basic mapping, proximity searching, routing, aerial images, local information, and weather.

Microsoft announced that Multimap will be run as a subsidiary, as part of its Virtual Earth and Search unit within the company's Online Services Group headed by Baylay.

"This mapping technology will help us build better services and compete in the search space where we want to compete more and more and make progress on the dominant position Google has," said John Mangelaars, Microsoft's European vice president for Online Services Business, to The Wall Street Journal.

Multimap has offices in America, Australia, South Africa and Turkey, as well as in London, and has a presence in 48 countries, BBC reports.

"Partnering with Microsoft gives us a world of new opportunities to build our mapping services into new technologies and applications," Multimap CEO Jeff Kelisky said in a statement.

After Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, Microsoft has acquired in May this year digital marketing firm aQuantive for 6 billion dollars in a bid to prevent Google's total domination of the online advertising market. It's probable that Multimap's acquisition is another step in preventing the search engine king from taking over the world of online advertising.