If you are looking for ideas for a family vacation, a pet-friendly hotel, or the perfect place for a romantic weekend, try travel search engine UpTake. It is geared only for travel and looks for keywords in destination descriptions and user comments across the Web that help it place results into different travel buckets. It can understand about one million different travel-related keywords and phrases. Even “girl getaway.”
After coming out of stealth last fall (here’s my initial review) and changing its name from Kango to UpTake, today it is emerging out of private beta, so anyone can check it out. (The reason it changed its name was because it sold the URL to Hearst’s classifieds site Kaango, which wants it eventually as a redirect. The change avoids any future confusion, but I thought Kango was the better name).
Also, instead of just covering California and Hawaii, UpTake is offering national coverage for 400,000 hotels, which CEO Yen Lee claims is more than Expedia, TripAdvisor, or Yahoo Travel (where he used to be the general manager). UpTake crawls all of those sites and thousands of niche travel sites as well. Lee is also quickly moving to national coverage for destinations and activities.
Google already loves UpTake’s results. To see its semantic SEO magic at work, try searching for “pet friendly hotels gilroy” or “family hotels” and the name of any city in California. A result with a Kango URL will likely pop up near the top.
Congrats to Yen, Elliot & the rest of the UpTake team
It’s a very cool product.
Rob Solomon left Yahoo & sold SideStep to Kayak for a bunch of money…and other Yahoo’s have done similar with their start ups. So, I’m expecting big (no, HUGE) things from these guys.
I’d love to take a vacation. Unfortunately I am too busy getting our app launched.
Maybe next time.
Peter
follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban
Uptake is a great idea. I loved it. But I tried it and at present it isn’t half baked. The search results are flawed and often half of the review sites or more don’t show. There are lots of other shortcomings and inconsistencies but we hope that they keep working and get them ironed out.
I spent quite some time with the product and did a review of Uptake last week on my (not for profit) site.
Aloha,
http://beatofhawaii.com
@beatofhawaii,
Hi! Thanks for giving us a try and helping us set expectations.
Yes, we agree that we have a long road to go before we’re great but we *know* that no other site aggregates as much content as us, and even with the product as it is we can save a lot of people time.
I read your review at beatofhawaii.com and its good. The issue of military affiliated lodging is an interesting one and generally doesn’t come up on top destinations…but it does in Hawaii because the tend to get favorable reviews, and the price/value equation is so great…IF you are eligible.
I’ll get in touch with you via Twitter and see where you think it is the most “half-baked”. We intentionally called our Things to Do “Almost Beta” because we are not quite there, BUT we feel the Hotels search is already pretty unique.
follow me @ http://twitter.com/elliottng