AskCity Rolls Up Local Search into a Small World
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | November 28, 2006 | Share This
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Yesterday Barry Diller announced that the IAC will soon release a massive local media site called AskCity.com. AskCity will essentially be a conglomeration of Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite, Ticketmaster, and all of the other ticketing, reviewing, map-tastic assets in IAC’s portfolio.
Says Diller, “It integrates maps, integrates events, integrates all of these different attributes that we have got in the best thing you will be able to use in a city to do things.” (was that a sentence?) Essentially, this is part of an extended project to turn Ask.com into a more powerful search service. Following the release of AskCity, Ask.com will undergo a major homepage redesign and technology update.
Though Ask is notoriously considered “behind” its larger Search competitors, this update could give it a competitive edge in the growing local search market. The IAC is known for its focus on existing technology rather than on new acquisitions, thus, AskCity is the first major product to come from IAC’s purchase of Jeeves over a year ago. Last year we blogged about the Jeeves’ acquisition, noting that Ask’s search technology could nicely tie together IAC’s various local properties. Now it looks like AskCity may be the product of such a search overlay, creating one of the largest (and most promising) mashups on the web.
The IAC hasn’t yet released the details of the new technology. But, given the hype and development time behind AskCity, I can tell you that it had better be one heck of a map.
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Topics: Advertising: Online, Ask.com, Investment, M&A, Media Convergence, SEM: Paid Search, Search: Local, Search: Vertical, Technology |
This site askcity.com looks good but can’t seem to be able to use it for Canadian cities or provinces. That part kinda sucks because I live in Vancouver, BC and can’t use it at all.