Link: Ask Business Search. Actually not, no. Seems that someone at Ask hasn't got the title element correct, because I'm actually talking about Ask City. Anyway, that aside, this is a new verticle from Ask, which allows you to search for businesses, events, movies or maps/directions at specific locations. *In the United States*. It's important to remember that point. What's also interesting is that no-where in the press release does it actually >say< that. I'm just supposed to know I guess.
Admittedly, it's in the first line of the help screens: AskCity is a search service that allows you to find Businesses, Events, and Movies for most cities in the U.S. That's fine - at least I know at that point, but is Ask really so US-centric that they can't even recognise that, shock horror, put it on the front page - other countries exist! Oddly though, it does very strange things if you start putting in post codes. I did a search for 'garage' at CM112DP (my post code) and it came back and told me there were no results for garage near 00-112 POL, together with a detailed map of Warsaw. A search for 'restaurant' in L12 also came up with no results for Warsaw. What is Ask's fascination with Warsaw, I wonder?
It's actually a really nice interface - very slick and easy to use. However, I still have reservations, and not of the restaurant nature either. I took a look at events, and because I've got an interest in the American Civil War, thought it would be nice to see what events are taking place in Richmond. However, I'm simply presented with a box saying 'Artist, Venue or Event', which isn't helpful at all. I'm not always going to know what I want; I may be interested in anything taking place about a subject for example, and this search option tends to imply that I should know exactly what I want. Fair enough, with a search like 'Civil War' I did get back some results, but nothing actually in Richmond. True, I could search by category, but this was then taking me into things such as 'Cheerleading', so it's a generic option. My query remains unanswered. By this point as well, my search screen was in a right state - the Event search box had now moved on to 'other', I'd got a 'search by category' slider open with no apparent way of closing it, my second pane was giving me information I didn't want, with no apparent way of getting back to where I was, although Back on the browser did it for me eventually. We then have another confusion - am I supposed to do that, or use 'Back to results' on the middle pane of information, which is an option.
So... lets try something else - how about a movie? Click on the movie option and up pops a box with 'restaurant' and one of my failed post code searches from earlier in there! Oooops. So what movie? I don't know - how about a comedy? Am I supposed to search on Comedy, Funny, Humor or what? The only clue is 'Genre'. I also have to choose a date, and that means today, tomorrow or sometime in this forthcoming week. If I want to use the service to help plan my events for the week this doesn't appear to be helping much. Trial and error shows that I was right with my first choice of Comedy. This provides exactly the right data though, of cinema, phone number, URL, address, directions, search nearby and a link to a review of the film. At last I'm also presented with a 'search by genre' box, but this only comes up when I've got a genre in there already - completely the wrong point in a search!
Clearly Ask City has lots of good functionality, and I'm being horrible having a go at it, and it's quite possible that my criticisms are unwarranted, but the sad fact is that if I can't find what I need virtually at once, then I'm not going to faff around trying to find it. This is a great start Ask, but there's a way to go yet. There's another, less grouchy review over on Greg Sterling's blog. Read that one too, and then try it out for yourself.
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