Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines, we pay a visit to the CEO of an Alternative Search Engine to get the inside scoop on their search engine.  Today we will hear about Travel Search Engine Kango from their CEO Yen Lee:


Kango Makes Travel Planning Easier

A personalized travel search engine, Kango collects travel options and traveler opinions from all over the web and returns the most relevant recommendations on where to go, what to do and where to stay based on a consumers’ preferences. A simple example is that Kango will return one set of hotel and activity recommendations for a San Francisco romantic getaway and different set for a San Francisco family vacation.

Today’s Travelers Don’t Need Help Booking; They Need Help Deciding What to Book

I’ve been in online travel for the last 10+ years, most recently as General Manager of Travel at Yahoo! (with the Search Division). While there, it became clear that travelers were not getting the help they needed from to make informed travel planning decisions. Once a travel plan had been made and travelers knew what they wanted to do and where they wanted to book, their needs were met through established booking sites (e.g. Expedia.com, Marriott.com etc.) or price shopping engines (e.g. Kayak.com or Sidestep.com). But, if consumers had not decided on a plan, it was a slog. They generally started in web search, then had to pick through different sites of inconsistent quality to piece together the information they need to make a planning decision. Consumers also don’t really know which sites they can trust, and what opinions (e.g. reviews, ratings, blogs, articles etc.) on those sites to trust. Finding the right trip is a time consuming experience.

Addressing Three Search Problems for Travelers

We designed Kango to deliver a better planning experience for personal travel. To do this we have to address three major search challenges:

1. Consumers doing travel planning wanted one place to find everything. This is challenging due to the fragmented nature of online travel. For example there are thousands of micro sites (e.g. kayak rentals in Sausalito) and thousands of non-commercial products (e.g. sandy, off-leash beaches in Marin) plus many excellent booking engines. We have to aggregate millions of pages from many web sites and map those pages to individual places to stay, activities and destinations etc. We expect that our consumers will leave Kango for other micro sites to dig deeper into the information we recommended to them.2. We need to derive weighted semantic tags (e.g. based on 57 opinions from 12 sites, this motel has a score of 80% for family friendly) and to create a filtering process to deliver fewer, more relevant results, based on consumers’ objective and subjective preferences. To derive these tags, we aggregate millions of travelers’ opinions and perform semantic analysis on those opinions.3. We have to be unbiased in our results. We need to deliver a complete set of reliable recommendations unbiased by advertising and based on those millions of traveler opinions. Like Google, our paid advertising is clearly labeled and clearly separated and does not influence the consumer results.

Leveraging the Collective Intelligence to Deliver Experienced Based Search

We launched Kango in late 2006 because we recognized there was an opportunity to create a travel search engine to address the consumers’ needs by leveraging the explosion of travel community and review sites. By collecting and analyzing user generated content, we help consumers find the right information they need to make an informed decision.We aspire to build Kango to benefit the online travel industry. Travel booking sites will benefit by getting experience-based rather than price-based leads and travel community sites will benefit from incremental traffic. Like the leading search engines, Kango’s personalized recommendations include abstracts of reviews, descriptions etc. that are most relevant to consumers. When consumers find a bit of information they want to find out more about, we send the consumer off to the relevant web site.

Addressing the Head and Tail of Travel

Having read the discussion between Adam @ Bessed and Jason @ Mahalo, we’d have to say “yes, we agree”. Yes, the consumer needs help finding useful information for the head AND for the tail – at least in travel. A consumer can’t easily find useful results for the most common searches (e.g. Paris hotels) AND for what their personal need is that is underlying their initial “common” search (e.g. romantic hotels in Paris or business hotels in Paris) AND for long tail searches (e.g. pet-friendly hôtels in Bordeaux). Of course, we are biased! We are planning to only address travel and not the wide variety of categories that Bessed and Mahalo plan to cover. We are solely focused on solving the traveler’s problem deciding where to go, where to stay and what to do.We are early in our evolution, and we welcome your feedback. Please come to Kango to sign up for our private beta (or public beta launch) that will kick off later this year.

Looking forward to hearing from you, Yen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under CEO Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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