After a year of speculation and beta tests Sina.com (SINA) has unveiled its new search engine at iAsk.com.
iAsk offers knowledge-based and community-based search in addition to the standard web-based search. While maintaining the power of traditional algorithm technology, Sina's iAsk offers an added bonus of users' interactivity with a unique Q&A platform.
iAsk categorizes search subjects into areas of news, pictures, music, knowledge, and video and allows users to input key words and questions of their interests. iAsk then ranks sites partly by subject-specific popularity, clusters results into subject groups, and lists related link collections by experts.
iAsk also features an "express zone" that filters all past information and data collected by the search engine on the subject being searched.
iAsk offers personalized features such as search by local content and an archive of personal favorites. iAsk is designed to work with both the Chinese and English language queries.