Thursday, April 16, 2009

Uptake.com - Search for Experiences.

I have recently came across this travel search site: www.uptake.com. It works like Google by crawling 1000+ travel sites and doing some data mining to categorize the contents. This is interesting as it's more like semantic search while other travel site directories can only categorie "sites" instead of "contents". By doing this, it works like an "experiecne search" that make it more friendly to travellers who have never been to the destination before and have to rely on "similiar experiences" to make decisions. When combined with some AI technics like natural language recongnition, it will be more interesting. There are other travel search engines trying to follow the similiar concepts (e.g. circos.com) and I believe that will be one of the future trends of travel search engines. Being a "smart Google in Travel" is everybody's dream. However, the site's problem, just like Google, is that it returns too many search results without clear suggestions and guidances(although they are relevant). It's trying to integrate everthing and lose focus. If I don't have much time for the researh, I would rather go for a travel agent (e.g. tripology.com) or find a similiar trip from others and customize it (e.g. travelmuse.com) or go to tripadvisor to gasp reviews from travllers. It's not intelligent enough from my point of view.

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