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Recently there has been some activity going on in the Local search space. Hot on the heals of Ask.City´s innovation AOL has now launched the AOL Local Search Beta.

AOL is using Mapquest to power their local search, and refreshes the local options as you move around on the map. Users can also provide comments and results are served quickly. This is a crowded space with competitors like Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Ask City competing with each other. With all of them focusing on different things. Google is trying hard to cover as much of the world as possible, Yahoo is betting on making it as social as it could, Ask wants to win by making it innovatively easy to use. With all this going on i really feel AOL is late to party.

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Ask´s local search offering AskCity has released a revolutionary usability enhancement in local search. The new tools enables users to specify their search area by drawing an arbitrary line or shape on the map. This is localized search using an extremely usable interface.

A typical local search asks the user to enter the zip code or street name as a central point along which the search for points of interests would be conducted. Users have the choice to limit the search 3,5, or 10 miles of along the radius of this central point. In case you are at the edge of a zip code or wants to search on the edge of a large street, you will most likely be disappointed by the results. However with the new feature the latitude and longitude of the search area is determined entirely by the user graphical, thus eliminating the problems mentioned above.

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