UpTake Under the Hood - the Interview
AltSearchEngines obtained an exclusive interview with Elliot Ng, VP of Marketing for UpTake.com. Elliott has co-founded two successful ventures, Netcentives and Loyalty Matrix. Most recently Elliott ran web marketing for Intuit QuickBooks. Elliott started his career as the product manager for PowerPoint and Excel at Microsoft. Elliott is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Business School.
Q: ASE: Elliott, how is UpTake’s vertical search the same or different from general search engines like Google?
A: Elliott Ng
As you know, all search engines do two things: matching, and ranking. Matching is the process of associating queries with the right documents. Ranking is ordering the documents based on their relevancy to a specific query term.
Statistic matching and ranking vs. semantic matching and ranking
General purpose search engines rely primarily on a keyword-based, statistical matching approach. There is no need for machine understanding of the concepts behind the keywords. UpTake.com uses a semantic matching and ranking approach. We believe this is a practical approach for a vertical domain (like travel) where its easier to use semantic analysis to understand the user intent behind queries, and also easier to extract meaning from documents.
Stateless search vs. conversational search sessions
The other big difference in our approach is that we can aim for a successful, multi-query, conversational search session. We can try to understand user intent as the user moves from general queries to more specific queries. Our vision of a conversational search experience is an achievable one because the context is someone’s search is known: they are planning travel. Even with the great advances Google has made in personalization and capturing Web history, the breadth of usage on Google for any given user means that Google must be very careful in trying to associate one query to another.
Q: ASE: Why do you think UpTake can deliver better results from a general search engine like Google?
A: Elliott Ng
The short answer is because we are focused on travel, so we can understand user intent better and analyze travel-related documents better.
Here’s the long answer: three interrelated factors help us deliver more relevant results and a better customer experience.
First, we’ve developed a domain-specific ontology. As you know, an ontology encompasses a set of concepts, relationships between concepts, and rules that can be applied to those concepts. The more specialized the field, the easier it is to create an ontology. Relative to the ontologies produced via academic research, what we are doing is very simple and practical. Our seed ontology is based on human expert knowledge. It has thousands of concepts, relationships and rules. Over time, our vision is to introduce machine-learning to automatically identify more relationships and propose more rules.
Second, we are conducting semantic analysis on a large number of documents. We only say the word “semantic” among search geeks and semantic Web fanboys like your audience! Here’s what we are doing:
Named-entity extraction. A simple example is we can identify a hotel or travel attraction and also extract all of that hotel or attractions’ attributes. This is made possible because we already understand how concepts are interrelated thanks to our travel ontology. We also identify travel reviews and opinions.
Sentiment analysis. We are using linguistic methods to analyze opinions and reviews to determine what a sentiment refers to (is it “kid-friendly”, “pet-friendly”, “dirty”, or “has a view”) and whether or not it is positive or negative.
Third, we believe that we can better understand user intent. How? In two ways: better query parsing and a conversational search approach.
Query parsing. Because we are talking about a very specific context, we can better look at query terms and understand them as concepts rather than just keywords. These concepts all come from the travel ontology so the relationship of these concepts to others are well known. For example, if someone types in “toddler-friendly” we know that this relates to “kid-friendly”, and that families generally appreciate “free-breakfast” and “suites.”
Conversational search approach. Vertical search engines have the potential of allowing users to express their intent in different ways. One way is to take a conversational search approach. The simplest way we are doing this is providing a rich set of refinement controls without typing in an entirely new search query as they would have to do in Google. Over time, we have an ambitious vision to allow users to highlight what they like and don’t like so we can provide more tailored recommendations to them. But we’ve only just begun on this part of the vision
Q: ASE: what are the biggest challenges for UpTake?
A: Elliott Ng
From a business standpoint, our biggest challenge as a brand new site is getting traffic. As we mentioned last week here in ASE, we firmly believe we live in a Google world and have optimized our search application to get traffic from natural search in Google. We do not think the host of new online travel sites are competitive. We don’t aim to be a travel online community or social network, and in fact think we can be very complementary to both new and old travel sites like these.
From a technology standpoint, we have plenty of work before we achieve our vision. We will continue to add more lodging types beyond hotels, and work to deliver the best search for things to do and attractions on the Web by the end of 2008! We also have some ideas around how we can help people decide “where to go”—no one on the Web truly delivers decision-support around picking your vacation destination.
Monetization is not a concern, even in difficult times like these. Travel lead generation is about an $8-10 billion market. And there is still about $300 billion of travel attractions and lodging that are not booked online, so there is still plenty of growth opportunity here.
Q: ASE: Well, since you work for a Travel Search engine, what’s your favorite travel destination?
A: Elliott Ng
By far the most memorable trip was to East Africa. My wife, Karen, and I traveled with a referred tour operator, Thomson Safaris, through some great game parks, including: Tarangire, Arusha, Serengeti, Kilimanjaro and Ngorogoro Crater. We also climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro; I made it to Barafu Camp at 15,600 feet (altitude pains) and Karen reached the summit at about 19,000 feet. After this, we lay on a white sandy beach in Zanzibar and recovered from what was the most difficult physical experience of my life!
