A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Ask launches Ask City, Jason Calacanis keynotes at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, how to utilize AdWords even when you do not have a web site, Search Engine Strategies in Chicago wraps up and finally rumors that Metcafe is up for sale at a price tag of $200 plus.

Monday

• Ask City Replaces Ask Local - Ask has has taken a bolder step to create a compelling local product in launching Ask City which replaces the Ask Local. Greg Sterling reports at Search Engine Land, that the new Ask City combines data and content from a range of IAC sites and third-party sources, including Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Evite, Trip Advisor, Yelp, InsiderPages, Judysbook and a number of other sites. It's broadly organized into four content areas: business listings (i.e., yellow pages), events, movies and maps & directions.

• Jason Calacanis Keynote at SES Chicago - Initial founder of Weblogs, Inc., ex-AOL employee and the man who Dugg Netscape, Jason Calacanis was Danny Sullivan’s guest today at Search Engine Strategies Chicago for the keynote conversation, reports Search Engine Journal. Jason discusses issues about SEO, evil on the internet, spam, paying Digg and other social bookmarking contributors plus agrees to do a word association round where his response to "ValleyWag" is liar, evil, idiot, stupid. You can listen to entire keynote via WebmasterRadio.FM.

• Utilize AdWords Even if You Do Not Have a Web Presence - The Inside AdWords blog announces a new feature that will allow advertisers to run AdWords despite the fact that they don't have a web site. Their solution is Hosted Business Pages which are informational webpages that new advertisers can create when they sign up for AdWords Starter Edition. It's important to note that a hosted business page is not a full-featured website with its own domain name, but rather a single landing page for your AdWords ads.

• Search Engine Strategies - Chicago 2006 Wraps Up - With final day of the SES Chicago show, Search Engine Roundtable has a recap of all the sessions they covered. You can find additional coverage of sessions at Lee Odden's Online Marketing Blog as well as Lisa Barone's coverage at the Bruce Clay Blog.

• Metcafe For Sale, Price Tag nears $200 Million - Via TechCrunch Metcafe, an Israeli owned video sharing site, is reportedly being sold for between $200-300 million. The buyer is currently unknown but there is speculation that it may be Yahoo. Metcafe is very similar to YouTube which was recently acquired by Google with the exception of considerably lower market share. Comscore reports that Metacafe had 3.8 million unique visitors and 83 million page views in October 2006. That compares to YouTube’s 23 million unique visitors and 1.5 billion page views.