Travel Consumers Attempt to Tame the SERPent with Vertical Search
Search engines have revolutionized the way consumers behave when online. The so-called 'small screen' of a search box is the starting point for most Web-based travel queries, delivering unquestioned utility. Drawn towards the light of all of these consumer eyeballs, travel providers represent one of the top four categories of paid advertising for the search engines, investing at a dizzying pace in order to ensure their sites are at the top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
However, as search companies have rallied to deliver increasingly more and more of the world's content, the one-size-fits-all approach has meant that consumers are left to sift through staggering amounts of information. Enter travel-specific vertical search engines, which are attempting to shorten the way for consumers in order to turn seemingly endless searching into finding what they seek (and at the same time delivering more qualified eyeballs to advertisers).
One of the biggest jokes about early search engines on the Web was that no matter what you searched for you were almost certain to get at least one salacious result back ("what's THAT doing there?"). From those early days, search engines certainly have come a long way.
Today, 72% of online travelers usually rely on the Internet when shopping for vacation travel. However, a simple query of the three major search engines for "travel to Denver" reveals from 2.1M (MSN), to 30.9M (Yahoo!) to 83M (Google) results, many of which are not exactly relevant to trip planning (e.g., the first page of one site returned an accountant's convention, another a hospital Web site...potentially useful but probably not the first thing most folks are looking for). Of course, one could sift through many of these pages chasing links, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a search engine that just provided travel-specific information, especially if travel information was what I was looking for?
Vertically focused search engines are not a new concept (e.g., Lexis-Nexis dates prior to the Internet). However, recently a number of attempts have been made to vertically focus search specifically for travel planning. Through a number of techniques ranging from filtering (i.e., simply eliminating the stuff that is not travel related), to categorization (i.e., organizing results so that they are clustered into categories), these sites are succeeding at weeding out results and shortening the way for travel consumers.
First up boardinGate (www.boardingate.com) - Proving that not all Travel 2.0 ventures are originating from the U.S., French-based boardinGate is dedicated to helping travelers in preparing, inspiring and (eventually) sharing travel. With the claim of being the first search "engine to be dedicated to travel information," their travel filtering approach is relatively simple (open to all professionals wishing to diffuse travel information via an RSS stream), and ensures that the results displayed represent travel planning content.
Blast off with Kosmix (www.kosmix.com) - Certainly one of the biggest challenges a search engine faces is delivering relevant content back from a query. Undaunted, Kosmix's mission is to deliver better results by finding the meaning, or at least the topic, of a Web page, and so far they have taken on four vertical industries (including health care and U.S. politics, along with travel). Perhaps the biggest differentiator in Kosmix is how they organize their result listings. Instead of the relatively flat organization of a traditional SERP, Kosmix categorizes their results into thirteen groupings (e.g. kid-friendly, guides/reviews, eating out) across five segments (e.g. deals, things to do, accommodation, etc.). One can further distill these results by creating a profile (e.g., eliminating museums if these are of no interest), and they also include a K-star ranking of the top three results from each grouping into a single results page. With the pedigree of creating the technology behind Amazon's Marketplace (Junglee), their founders certainly seem up to the task of helping readers search less, but find more great information.
Never to be outdone, Google (www.google.com/coop) has gotten in the act as well. Out of the relative obscurity of the Co-op portion of Google (Google Co-op is a platform which enables searchers to use their expertise to help others find information), emerges yet another way to boil down the sea of SERPs. In response to a simple city query (e.g. "Denver") users receive the option to refine results for Denver by six categories ranging from dining guides to tours and day trips, and even suggested itineraries are offered. One disappointing note is that the results of "travel to Denver" do not offer this refinement.
Of course, Yahoo! (travel.yahoo.com) has categorized their search for quite some time. The travel section of Yahoo! is rich with content, and is directly accessible from a downloadable toolbar or a link on the home page. The first result of the "travel to Denver" query is a link to Yahoo!'s Denver visitor guide (part of the Travel section of Yahoo!).
One of the key tenets of travel 2.0 is that the CRM and personalization promises of the first Internet wave will finally come to pass, and the buzzword for this incarnation is 'behavioral targeting.' The easiest way to explain behavioral targeting's impact is to imagine that both you and a colleague enter the same search query. Instead of the similar (if not identical) results that both queries deliver now, with behavioral targeting in place, the sum total of all of your past queries (perhaps over several years), would be calculated in filtering and providing the best results for you alone. Use of this type of targeting is still in its infancy, being experimented with at Yahoo! and no doubt other search engines as well.
Although this whole trend of vertical search for travel is just beginning, the potential impact for advertisers could be dramatic. For example, just think how much more targeted and likely to deliver a click-through a search ad in the 'accommodations' portion would be versus that of a generic SERP. It will be interesting to see how all these vertical search companies plan to generate traffic and whether they will roll out other monetization plans besides paid search.
