Barry Diller's latest brainchild is AskCity, Ask.com's answer to CitySearch, which debuts today. It's a local search network — half the page is devoted to search, the other half is a Google-style map.

By our reckoning, Ask's search engine still can't hold a candle to Google's, but this site does have some useful features. First off, you can plot more than two points on a map, and there's a toolbar so you can draw on your maps, save them, and e-mail them — all without having to resort to a time-consuming hack. What else? Many of AskCity's features look similar to Google's and aren't very useful at that: the restaurant-search tool is pretty weak. However, the movie-search function is useful: enter comedies in 10036 and you'll get a map plotting nearby movie theaters, and a list of names and times that link directly to Fandango. And you can choose between getting driving or walking directions.

The bad news for Ask, of course, is that Google will probably add a toolbar to its map page next week, and nobody will remember that Ask did it first. — S.E. Kramer