Ask goes local for real

I remember saying a while ago that local search was in its very beginning stages. What we’re going to eventually is a search that works with the following type of inquiry:

Where’s a pizza place close to Starbucks in downtown Kirkland, WA?

When that happens, and when I can get at it from my cell phone, I’ll be pretty happy with local search. But we are still a ways off.

Ask has for some time been really pushing their new search. And to be fair, the new Ask search is really good - I remember seeing critics who rated the results better than Google’s, and they started the whole “rollover to see a preview of the result page” bubble, which is very cool.

It’s just really hard to gain search traction in a Google world.

I spotted today that Ask launched “Ask City,” which is their real foray into the local search arena.

I’m in the habit of using Google’s local search, mostly because the search box is flexible and results have user ratings built in (want a tire repair shop? read what other users thought about their repairs).

Ask City breaks it down into a couple boxes, which is less flexible but probably better for the average user. Where they really shine is in showing the results: they drop you into three frames - the left shows your original search, with some filtering options, the middle shows a list of results in classic search result format, and the right shows a map.

One really big no-no, however, is that the results pages are not linkable! Why would you do that??

There are some cool miscellaneous options like saving a snapshot of the map at any given point or filtering movies by genre, but I’m not sure that it’s enough to beat out Google’s simplicity.

Ask is doing a lot of stuff right on the features side, and I like them, but I’m not using them yet. I wonder what it takes to make that happen.