May 31, 2006

Travel Green With Tips From Google

Promoting companies that offer environmental benefits, Google has partnered with The Earth Day Network to provide Have a Green Summer tips for traveling green. Check out special "tours" using Google technologies that highlight businesses that offer a useful green alternative to the status quo, including an alternative fuel car service out of New York, (I actually used Ozo on a previous trip), and earth friendly fun activities pinpointing parks, links to hiking trails and museums.

The tips Google provides are meant to guide searchers and better help those looking for environmentally responsible hotels and accommodations. The tips simply add environmental qualifiers to terms one would normally use. The first of five total tips at this time is to try [environmentally friendly hotel] instead of simply [hotel].

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 10:08 AM | Permalink

May 11, 2006

Google Destination Guides: Not Much There -- Yet

A part of Google Co-op, "Destination Guides" was promoted as Google City Guides at Google Press Day today. And while everything about Co-op has been officially qualified as a work in progress, this is something of a disappointment - as are many of the content areas and the general user-experience of Co-op.

Danny has a more complete write up of Co-op here. Co-op is an ambitious project, not unlike Base, to create verticals, add structured and user-generated content and make the search experience more personalized. If you want to create your own "vertical search engine," which is one of the aims of this project, its also somewhat confusing.

The concept is cool, the experience not yet.

Google?s ?Destination Guides? aren?t really city guides, in my opinion, they?re travel-related information. Right now, there?s not much of a there there. They?re really quite weak compared to, for example, Citysearch, Yelp, AOL City Guides or many of the well-known travel sites.

I?m going to New York later this month so I plugged in "New York."

What you get are a number of standardized categories that allow for subsequent query refinements: i.e., ?Suggested Itineraries,? ?Sightseeing,? ?Dining Guides,? ?Lodging Guides,? ?Museums? among a number of others.

Here are the results for Lodging Guides. They aren?t very satisfying. I can?t compare prices on hotels or see recommended hotels; I still have to click on more links to get to hotel verticals, travel aggregators, etc. It?s not really all that helpful. Yahoo?s travel metasearch site FareChase or its community travel site Trip Planner produce much more useful results at this point, as do sites like Openlist or TripAdvisor.

Once more content partners become involved and more community content becomes available the Destination Guide experience should improve. That might equally be said of Co-op in its entirety.

As Google's Marissa Mayer said today, ?Innovation not perfection.?

Posted by Greg Sterling at 2:48 AM | Permalink

April 17, 2006

Google Travel Coming Soon?

Russell Shaw feels that Google is making a play at the travel vertical. Russell spotted a Google job posting for a "Google: Senior Account Executive, Travel Vertical." Russell explains that the job posting details "sounds" that "Google is building a Google Travel brand." I personally do not see the wording suggesting more than Google sending more leads on a PPC or CPA basis to the major travel search engines. However, it would not surprise me to see Google release a http://travel.google.com/ some day. Last October they added a travel OneBox that brings you to travel engines such as Expedia (the default), Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity.

Russell believes Google may partner or buy Orbitz, since it is currently fairly available to be bought and it is based on Chicago, just like the Google job opening. Time will tell on this, until then, you can search at Google using JFK to YYZ style searches to get the travel OneBox results from Google.

Postscript: A comment on Shaw's post says this is likely a job related to selling ads to travel industry advertisers, as noted above, and that a similar job has been posted in the past. You can find the job posting here.

Postscript 2: Google told m-Travel that it had no immediate plans to announce a Google Travel site.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:12 AM | Permalink

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