This morning Ask unveiled it’s new solution for local search and it’s called AskCity. They market this new search solution as 4 search engines in 1 combining the following target searches.

• Businesses
• Events
• Movies
• Maps & Directions

AskCity uses correlated and categorized information to provide you the primary results. They get much of this information through their IAC/InterActiveCorp sister businesses such Citysearch, Ticketmaster, and ServiceMagic.

Ask does a fine job with their usability and layout. I find their interface pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate. The way they categorize and present you with related searches is slick and intuitive.

The results do lack a link to to web results after finding an event or location. It would be nice to explore a topic further if you were looking for more information. I found myself opening another Firefox tab to perform a web search on the business and events I looked up in AskCity because it only provides data from it’s partners. A simple link would do the trick.

The AskCity map is sweet, very much like Google’s. But AskCity has added a couple feature gems I have not seen before.

• Drawing tools
• Snapshot Tiles

The drawing tools are very similar to what you would find in a paint application. You can draw lines, shapes, add addresses, and type labels. The snapshot tiles allow you to grab snapshots of the map you are currently looking at and save them them in a tiled list along the bottom for when you want to jump back to them. These tiles are saved via cookies so they are available the next time you visit AskCity.

All in all I think AskCity provides a fine local search product. Now lets see if I actually get back to use it more than when I’m just doing a review. You can read their announcement and other posts at their offical Ask blog.