Semantic Travel Search Engine UpTake Launches
A review by ReadWriteWeb’s Josh Catone.
According to a comScore study done last year, booking travel over the Internet has become something of a nightmare for people. It’s not that using any of the booking engines is difficult, it’s just that there is so much information out there that planning a vacation is overwhelming. According to the comScore study, the average online vacation plan comes together through 12 travel-related searches and visits to 22 different web sites over the course of 29 days. Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make that process easier.
UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities — over 400,000 of them — from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations. You can think of it as Metacritic for the travel vertical, but rather than just arriving at an aggregate rating (which it does), UpTake also attempts to figure out some basic concepts about a hotel or activity based on what it learns from the information it reads. Things such as, is the hotel family friendly, would it be good for a romantic getaway, is it eco friendly, etc.
To read the rest of Josh’s review, click here.
