Goby, Search, Startups, Travel

Some thoughts on the convergence of Search, Travel, Local & Social

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There’s a convergence coming, between the worlds of search, travel, local, and social. It used to be that if you were traveling, you used a guidebook and map and talked to the concierge, then you graduated to TripAdvisor and Expedia (and if you were adventurous, Kayak). People’s use of search engines tended not to intersect with their travel planning. In recent years of course Google has become a de facto part of the travel planning experience – although by no means a perfect one. And some search engines have introduced travel products (notably Bing Travel). And for planning your weekend, search engines have historically not been of much use at all – they don’t understand the concept of time or location very well (“this weekend” is just a few keywords to them), and don’t understand your task (when I search for beaches on Cape Cod, why do I get back results for restaurants with the word “beach” in them?). Robert Scoble has some thoughts on this subject, here. Google appears to be moving in this direction, with their rumored acquisition of ITA, which powers many airfare metasearch sites including Kayak. Their abortive attempt to acquire Yelp shows how search & local are converging as well.

But there’s a new game in town – social/local gaming, in particular with things like Foursquare and Gowalla, that combine social gaming with local-search-like results, allowing people to broadcast where they are and what they’re doing. There’s an evolving “stack” of technologies, including location databases and engagement tools, nicely summarized by Chris Dixon. (I disagree with his assertion that location databases will become commoditized – the information is too hard to come by, and companies like InfoUSA make hundreds of millions in revenue providing this kind of data. Not to mention the startups like SimpleGeo and Locationary and for that matter Goby, that are tackling the problem, but I digress).

This kind of engagement is going to have a profound impact on how people plan travel and figure out their weekends. DeepDish Creative (http://deepdishcreative.com/wordpress/2010/02/foursquare-for-tourism/) is talking about how destination marketing organizations can leverage these tools to promote their destination. But I see two problems with this generation of tools as they apply to this problem:

  1. They are after-the-fact. I tend to engage with Foursquare after I’m already AT someplace – Foursquare isn’t really involved in my decision process, it simply records what I’ve already decided. As a result, it has limited use (not no use, just limited use) in making decisions.
  2. These tools only recognize a limited set of entities, primarily businesses (in fact, primarily restaurants). It’s hard to check in at a U2 concert, because it’s an event, and it’s hard to check in at the Grand Canyon, because it’s not really an entity, it’s a generalized (and off-the-beaten-track) place. God help you if you want to check-in on a hiking trail!

Addressing those last two elements would create a resource that will not only appeal to my vanity & let me broadcast what I’m doing, but more importantly help me decide.

The key need here is a semantically meaningful database of things, to key all your features off of, and search tool to find & organize them – not just a pile of URLs. The system needs to know that Yo La Tengo is a band playing at the Fillmore on the 23rd of April, with a date and a location – not just a pile of keywords without any meaning. Any system like this needs to cover hotels and restaurants as well as non-business entities like hiking trails or concerts, and once you leave hotels/restaurants, this information is hard to come by. Once you have the database of entities, it is straightforward to build a platform for people to engage with their networks, in the context of that content. Once you have a strongly categorized, rich database of things to do, and a strong network of people telling you what they are interested in, you can provide compelling recommendations as well as support discovery. And, strangely enough 8), that’s where we’re headed with Goby – we plan to be right at the intersection of this convergence.

Search

Apple buys Siri – quick thoughts on how Google is being flanked….

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Following rapidly on my recent blog post about what Apple’s search strategy might be (https://www.viking2917.com/is-apple-building-a-search-engine-should-they/), they’ve bought Siri. A full frontal assault on Google is futile, but Facebook and Apple are both finding ways to attack Google in a flanking manner. Apple is doing it through entertainment, apps, rich advertising (Quattro acquisition), and task-centric, information-rich applications (Siri). Facebook is plastering “Like” buttons all over the internet, thus gaining very valuable information – “Like” is essentially a human-driven relevance signal, one that is much more direct and personalized than the algorithmic PageRank of Google, which relies on computing links and link values. Facebook’s “like” button gives them a simple popularity metric – how long before they use that to build a new kind of search & information access tool? Certainly such a metric is gamable, but at scale, it may not matter….

Goby, Startups

TV

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Recorded today in NY for Shelly Palmer’s Digital Life, an NBC show in NY focused on consumer tech. My first time doing TV. Makeup & the whole bit. First observation: These people work early! The makeup person told me she started work around 3:30am. ick. Good news for her: home by 10:30am.

Recording was fun. 3 minutes (my segment) goes by SO fast when the lights go on. You’ve got to have your message down to so few words to get it in there crisply. Watching Shelly was fun – so matter of factly creates so many facial expressions, rarely makes any mistakes. When he looks at you on camera, it’s with such focus that I had a hard time not feeling like a deer in the headlights…

They had these cool robotic cameras (for some reason my picture didn’t come out), but one of the other guests was telling me that those cameras replace 3 or 4 cameramen, driving costs way down. They seem very similar to the robots that are in many factories and warehouses these days.

Came down the night before and caught Los Campesinos, a welsh punk band at the Fillmore. Those guys rock. Was going to mention it on the show, but NBC doesn’t really seem like a “welsh punk” kind of show 8)

Goby, Search

Search Insider Summit & presentation

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Presented last week at the Search Insider Summit – great event with a lot of learnings. Everyone seems to be talking about the increased richness and personalization of search, and how it intersects with personal passions and the new social media environment, and what that means for traditional search marketing. Some roundtable notes can be found here: http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=2159.
My presentation focused on “context” as the organizing principle for search innovation. The future of search is about context. The era of one-size-fits-all search engines – a “search box and ten blue links” – is over. Gone are the days that a keyword search returns the same 10 results for every person, whenever and wherever they run the same query. Tomorrow’s search will be personalized, tailored for location, tailored for context, even for the weather! My presentation:

Abstract: The future of search is about context. The era of one-size-fits-all search engines – a “search box and ten blue links” – is over. The future will be contextualized and task-centric, focused on enabling discovery and not just keyword matching. Gone are the days that a keyword search returns the same 10 results for every person, whenever and wherever they run the same query. Tomorrow’s search will be personalized, tailored for location, tailored for context, even for the weather!

Context is environmental, task-centric, social, user-centric, and data & domain aware. Tomorrow’s search engines will know what time it is, where you are, what the weather is like, what your interests are – if you let them. They’ll know as much as you’ll let them about your social network and what they’re interested in, and let you leverage your network to help make decisions. They’ll use this entire context to do a better job of answering your query. Tomorrow’s search engines will have a much richer awareness of data than just a list of keywords – in addition to leveraging context, they will create context. They’ll condense volumes of information down to consumable “chunks” you can use to shape your discovery process. Based on your task and context, they’ll understand how to combine raw results with other information (photos & media, maps, summary views) to help you make sense of the ocean of information that’s out there.

This is starting to happen already. Drawing on examples from Google, Bing, Search Insider Summit alums Milo and Goby, and other new startups like Hunch and Siri, we’ll paint a picture for how tomorrow’s consumers will access information. We’ll explore what that might mean for brands and search marketing professionals looking for new and better ways to address the right audiences at the right time through the right channels.

Startups

Startup I wish someone would build: TheNextOne.com

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How many times have you gone to lunch or drinks with somebody, tried to figure out who paid last time, and promised “ok the next one’s on me”? Happens to me all the time. I wish someone would build this app – “thenextone.com” – I go to lunch, hit a mobile site or send a text message, record who I went to lunch with, and who paid. Then, next time, voila! You know who’s turn it is. Presumably could even be integrated into foursquare or gowalla so that as you are checking in, it’s recorded. Done.

Bonus points for cross-referencing to my social network so the “I owe” is tagged onto the social identities for the people I owe or am owed by. Karma points for buying more than you are bought for…..

Books, Startups, Travel, Search, Music