Ash K. Gilpin

The new AskCity product, which combines Ask.com’s existing maps product (overhauled last February) with deep local content (information, reviews, etc.) and very good search, might just be my new go to source for maps and local business information.

The reason that AskCity has such good content is that they’ve taken it from CitySearch, another service owned by parent company IAC. CitySearch has ten years of local content, and that is now deeply integrated with Ask’s maps product.

Key categories are Businesses and Services, Events, Movies, and Maps & Directions. The three pane interface allows users to conduct multiple searches, revise itineraries, create multi-point driving or walking directions (only Yahoo and Ask offer multi-point directions). Restaurant reservations are linked via OpenTable, event tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster (another IAC property) and soon they will integrate movie ticket purchases through Fandango. Searches can be refined by neighborhood, cuisine or movie genre.

Ask Users can also pin items (events, places) onto a map, draw their own notes on the map, and send a permalink to the customized map to friends for printing or for their comments.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Technology, Ramblings, The Net, Business, Entertainment, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.