China Sina Launched Own Search Engine – iAsk.com
Filed in: Web — July 2nd, 2005
The popular China web portal site, Sina has launched own search engine — iAsk.com. Liew took a brief review of the new China search engine.
The Name
Note, it has nothing to do with Ask.com, though their name look VERY similar.
Interface
Beside normal search(both English and Chinese), the iAsk also search for images, news, music, media, local(China), and knowledge engine. Like previous short life Google X, the icons enlarge when mouseover.
The Search Results
The speed is slow compare to Baidu, result are mostly limited to China. Sina’s own search results get very high priority. When I search for “头文字 D”(Initial D), 8/10 of first page search result are from Sina!
The “Ask” Part
The main feature of iAsk is that you can ask a question and get answered by other users. It is something like Google Answer but it does not cost you any cent to ask (but some “points”).
Answering the questions will not get yourself any profit as well, you will get some credit points. The more points you collected the higher level you are in the iAsk. You can also assign some of the points to your future questions, so that it has high priority to be answered (person who answer you will get the points).
ViVi Folder
Similar to Yahoo! MyWeb, you can save the search result into your online ViVi Folder. Or, look for others collection at http://vivi.sina.com.cn/. Please note that most bookmarked links are 18SX… Kids are not welcome. Oh, it does Tags too!
Thought:
The “Ask” part is good idea but I don’t see why someone will spend alot of time to answer others question and get nothing tangible(read: money) in return. It looks like a normal Q & A forum for me, anyway. On the search part, iAsk.com still have alot space for improvement, especially the search quality. After all, ViVi is my guys favorite. You can get alot adult rated gossips there. 
