Ask’s local search service, Ask City has just announced the launch of a brand new set features that they call “search enabled drawing tools”. This nifty set of tools allows users to draw boundaries on a map and limit their search to the marked-out area. Users can also send the marked out maps to friends.
Ask City was launched in December 2006, and has been relatively unknown and unused compared to local / map search offerings from their bigger competitors, Google Local and Yahoo! Local. The tools currently work only for US business searches.
While this new toolset is nowhere near enough to make Ask break the into big 3, it will help them win over some users from the other search engines.
