Somewhat quietly, last week Kayak posted a new feature that opens up access to their search data using Kayak Trends. A key feature of Kayak Trend data is the KAYAK Travel Index™, an a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on KAYAK sites, and aligns that with average combined prices people select for hotel and flights.

In Kayak Trends, you can get a snapshot of most popular destinations and search demand for them by day, week, month or year, as well as see a shift in seasonal trends by looking at the biggest upward and downward trends at a glance, or by Top 50 destinations.

Download and dissect data by destination

All of the trend data can be exported to CSV with average price data and demand averages, and one of the more interesting features of the Kayak Travel Index is the ability to look deeper into the search behavior surrounding target destinations. By putting in any airport code or city name and looking at 3 months, 6 months and 1 year trends in search demand for that location, it becomes  a useful baseline tool for a travel search marketer. You can get an at-a-glance overview of search origin data (useful for better geo-targeting in paid search ads and conversion factors), the most searched hotels in the destination, and the most popular hotel selections. Kayak says better labeling is coming next week.

Coming out of (private) and into public Beta today is a new hybrid travel and local search engine, Goby.com (GO-be), a new entrant into the foray of “deep web” search technology, led by a founding team with web and search experience from Endeca (CEO Mark Watkins), Lycos (Jim Fell) and Reprise Media (CTO Vince Russo), MIT (professor Michael Stonebraker, co-founder) as well as travel distribution experience with John Walsh (World Travel Holdings.) The start-up received its funding from Flybridge Capital and Kepha Partners.

Using a 3-box format for search queries, Goby’s intention is to help guide the user through task-centric discovery to answer queries relevant to “things to do nearby”, whether that location is a vacation destination or your local city area.

Throughout its (private) beta phase, Goby.com identified up to 250 categories of content surrounding popular themes and search queries that fall into these three categories of understood concepts. In addition to queries on things to do, outdoor recreation and activities, dining, entertainment, live music, museums, historic sites are top suggestions, as well as more travel specific concepts, such as hotels and lodging topics.

Currently using about 500 pre-qualified, authoritative data sources (or “deep web” databases) or known local sources such as Yelp.com, Goby contextualizes and organizes these results in a clean format, using Google Maps and images (also from Flickr) to enhance results.

Interestingly, Goby appears to cover a broad range of (and even some obscure) locations across the USA, as opposed to a beta launch with limited destinations. If you live in a large city like San Francisco, you can browse for things to do on a foggy day, or if are looking for a weekend getaway in a small coastal town for a food and wine festival, you might give Goby a try. Although some users may initially be disappointed to see a limited number of results to any query (very few test searches return more than 100 listings), it may not matter if the first ten to twenty are the most relevant and useful results.  An iPhone app is currently in development.

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else? Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is. SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities. Here’s a screenshot of a search for “anaheim real estate” in Anaheim, even though I’m up in Washington state.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

In the example above, I’m doing a search for the rock band U2, and I’m searching French-language results on the French versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I’m also including local newspapers, too. The search results page has a tab for web results and a tab for news results. The web results page, like any good meta search site, tells you where each listing was found, i.e., “Ranked 1 by Google search” or “Ranked 4 by Yahoo search.”

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

See also:

• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Kayak travel search launched a formal attack on Microsoft’s Bing Travel yesterday in an article that appeared on Wired, Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us!. Apparently, Kayak’s executives are more than a little steamed by the eerily similar look and feel, and even went so far as to put Microsoft on legal notice (presumably a cease & desist) to knock it off.

Wired implies that Kayak is concerned about the similarities causing brand confusion with its users, and even noted an “uncomfortable” comparison in their own review of Bing, and points out that others have noticed as well. You can see further evidence of others comparing Bing vs Kayak from a variety of sources, including TechCrunch’s early review, where commenters pointed out that Bing Travel gave lower airfares than Kayak, though they use the same airline data sources.

Microsoft spokesperson Whitney Burk denied the accusations , telling Wired:

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

However, the Farecast technology which Microsoft acquired is not the issue here, since Kayak does not run a similar fare prediction service, they are not claiming an infringement on technology, but just the user interface, namely Bing’s use of “sliders”.

Sliders have become a popular tool on many “Web 2.0″ based sites, and Farecast did initially use them in design.  Last year, another start-up in airfare comparison, InsideTrip.com, debuted (May 2008) using sliders much like Kayak or Bing does. In Greg Sterling’s write-up, you can see the similarity:

Note that InsideTrip was also founded by Dave Pelter, who held two year executive position at Farecast.com. Is it the fact that InsideTrip.com has not gained (or rather, sustained) enough traction for Kayak users to be as affected by the similar slider options?

Hakia holds similar views

Kayak isn’t the only one crying foul, as hakia also blogged when Bing launched, hakia claimed that Bing’s categorized search is a similar version to its own hakia Galleries, using the example of a search for “Obama”:

“hakia Galleries prove 17 aspects of this query. We save the user time by answering 17 Obama related questions in one search. Compare the hakia Obama gallery with the same search at Bing.com (Bing provides only 7 aspects of this search query).”

Hakia’s COO, Melek Pulatkonak also recently told Investor’s Business Daily that they’d been in early partnership talks with Microsoft in July, and stated:

“We were approached by Microsoft to show them how the hakia galleries worked, and we did, and now they have a similar feature — we showed them how to do it,” she said. “We were surprised that it is a featured part of and the most differentiated part of Bing.”

Microsoft also denies that hakia had any part in the development of Bing’s categorized search, which Microsoft refers to as “faceted search”.

In February 2008, when Vanessa Fox wrote that Eytan Seidman, Program Management Director over core relevance at Microsoft Live Search (now Bing.com) was leaving Microsoft (and Seattle) for a start-up, she may not have known that he was jumping into murky waters of travel search. Today, Eytan’s start-up site was unveiled – Oyster.com, a site that generates professional, verified hotel reviews.

Shortly after that announcement, Oyster Hotel Reviews closed a Series A with Bain Capital and Accelerator Ventures (via TechCrunch) worth $6.4 million, to launch a start-up with his brother (Elie Seidman), Elie’s co-founder in another business, Epana, (Ariel Charytan)  and fellow Microsoft Live Search engineer (Andy Laucius).  The result:

Oyster Hotel Reviews

Many people looking at Oyster for the first time are undoubtedly going to say “so what?”. It’s small and is well behind its competitors in scale. True, there’s nothing immediately innovative about Oyster search itself, other than the content factor. But the value of relevancy in its algorithm depends upon the depth of content, which is what the search tool is ultimately churning through. In addition to a default ranking system based on several factors, Seidman also admits that what they really need to help refine the search algorithm at this point is user data.

Seidman points out that Oyster’s most valuable search asset is their unique content, that they are blending the inspirational aspect of travel search with specific data requests – whether they be traditional traveler requirements (spa, pets welcome, beachfront) to more experiential themes (if vodka, for example, is your #1 vacation must-have), and not least of all,  budget – travelers can hone in on the right vacation experience for their expectations. Oyster is also taking the approach to remove geography from primary search, and leave it to the user selects a particular destination to narrow results.

In the spirit of Oyster’s simplified Pro & Con style, here is a rundown of its features:

Pros

• Lightning fast search results as you select options.
• Clean user interface.
• Compelling content – imagery & copy.
• Pros & Cons are easy scannable by users.
• User comments are allowed.
• Depth of data.

Cons

• Lacking breadth of data / limited destinations.
• Less than 500 total reviews.
• Failure to highlight user query (terms) in results. Example: a search for ‘scuba‘ doesn’t immediately encourage users to click one result over the next.
• Pearl rating system isn’t yet explained to users.

Only time will tell if Oyster can scale to be a serious competitor in the hotel reviews space, and it will ultimately come down to time, scale and logistics for this small player to become a trusted resource in the space. As Greg Sterling says in this post, “assuming good SEO, Oyster could become a visible and more trustworthy source of hotel reviews.”

For additional insight and observations, I’ve gone into additional (and perhaps excruciating) detail in my in-depth review, Shucking Pearls of Wisdom Out of Oyster.com.

FareChase, Yahoo’s discount travel search engine, is shutting its doors today. An alert on the FareChase web site indicates that today is the service’s final day, and encourages users to instead use Yahoo Travel.

In her first conference call back in January, new CEO Carol Bartz said “everything’s open for examination” when it comes to streamlining operations and improving the bottom line.

Yahoo gave this statement to Search Engine Land:

“After careful consideration, Yahoo! is discontinuing FareChase, a travel metasearch engine, effective March 25, 2009. After this date, users will no longer have access to FareChase to compare travel prices, but can continue to shop for and book flights, hotels, cars, cruises and vacation packages through Yahoo! Travel and its partners.

“Yahoo! continues to align resources to focus on core strategic priorities and deliver superior user experiences on the Internet. Discontinuing FareChase will allow Yahoo! to focus our efforts on other key features for Yahoo! Travel, such as Yahoo! Travel Guides and Yahoo! Trip Planner.”

Yahoo bought FareChase in 2004, and in recent years had taken noticeable steps to give the service more exposure. They added it to the Yahoo Travel home page in early 2008, and even featured it as a the travel shortcut in Yahoo’s main search results:

With a couple of Stanford graduates as founders, a new entrant to the online travel space officially launched its beta site today, WholeTravel.com.

Following a small but growing trend in the travel search space, Whole Travel uses what they call “Blue Sky Search”, or the ability for searchers to use open-ended experiential queries, rather than inputting specific location data, airport codes or exact dates for travel.

Searchers on WholeTravel.com are encouraged to type in eco-friendly activities (mountain trekking, wildlife tours, canoeing) or broad destination ideas such as “rainforest” or “desert”. With an editorial feature called “Whole Ranking”, results can be ordered by a scale of sustainability, based on factors such as on-site environmental and conservation efforts, renewable energy, contribution to the local economy, social and cultural experiences available to travelers.

The company has also started a non-profit arm, the Whole Travel Foundation, to increase sustainable travel practices, help promote and manage Whole Ranking, among other projects to help tourism businesses manage sustainability.

For the leisure traveler who considers sustainability, experience is the key motivator behind the purchase decision, so price sensitivity is less of a factor, though plenty of lower cost options (like tent camping or rustic cabins) can be found on Whole Travel, as well as resorts with high-end amenities.

Whole Travel has aggregated results from over 4,000 boutique hotels and eco-friendly resorts around the world, and will send visitors directly to their websites to book these unique accommodations (you won’t find many global hotel chains here), while they’ve partnered with Kayak for travel bookings.

In July, Jupiter Research published a report, Green Online Travelers: Assessing the Brand Impact of Travelers’ Environmental Concerns. Jupiter analyst Diane Clarkson had this to say about the potential growth of this market segment:

“We found that, among online green travelers, 7% are what we call “Dark Green”. These travelers have a favorable impression of travel companies with green policies and are actively green in their travel purchases (i.e. researching accommodation green policies, buying carbon offsets) etc.

WholeTravel will certainly appeal to this segment of Dark Green online travelers, for whom sustainability is a booking motivator. I believe WholeTravel will also have an appeal to travelers who, while they may not be in the Dark Green segment, are concerned about the environment and are looking for alternative accommodation options.”

Co-founder and CEO Matthew Davie said that in this market segment, up to 42% of consumers consider green aspects as part of their purchase decision. With travel being a $115 Billion dollar industry, this micro-segment has the opportunity to grow quickly.

Yesterday travel search engine Kayak announced that it had built a display ad platform to leverage search queries and serve more relevant graphical ads across its network. These display units will potentially replace the text ads currently shown on search results and other pages on Kayak.com and its affiliate sites. Reportedly, however, consumers can turn them off if they like.

According to the release:

Similar to the text ads that are already available through the Kayak Publishing Network (KPN), the new display ad system helps travel marketers target their ads based on search criteria including destination, origination, trip dates, length of stay, specific airline/hotel/car brands and car type. Referrals generated by either ad type can pass consumers’ search information (destination, travel dates, etc.) through to the advertiser’s Web site, allowing the advertiser to display relevant search results instead of a generic landing page.

Reflecting Kayak.com’s commitment to usability, consumers can turn off display ads indefinitely by simply clicking on a “hide display ad” link below each advertising unit.

One could see this as another form of behavioral targeting, which is now pervasive online. But another way to regard this is as an attempt to marry the directional power of search with the emotional appeal of display. This is also what is going on with display ads on Google image search and video advertising on Google.com or Yahoo.com results.

Advertisers in many cases clearly prefer display advertising, especially brand advertisers. But search has been largely hostile to display until very recently. I suspect we’ll see more such efforts to blend the two in the future as more brand advertising dollars make their way online.

The Travel category online is an example of how the Internet has made our lives both easier and more complicated. It very clearly exemplifies “the paradox of choice.” Indeed, there are hundreds of travel sites that provide booking services and travel content of one sort or another. You’re “empowered” with information but also potentially overwhelmed by it. Given this, it would seem we don’t need any more travel sites. TravelMuse, which has just launched, makes the argument that there’s still room for more “inspiration” in travel search.

The company sees itself like a “magazine,” with content created by professional writers, combined with beautiful photography:

It sees these features, among others, as differentiators from more generic, utilitarian travel search engines. But the big attraction of the site is its “Inspiration Finder,” which marries search functionality with “discovery” in an interesting way.

Users provide their budgets and vacation criteria, things like how far they’re willing to fly, how much they want to spend per person, what season they want to go, their family composition, and their interests. The tool then matches vacation suggestions and packages to those parameters and interests and presents them in a comparison shopping-like grid format:

There will eventually also be community and user-generated content. There are also useful personalization tools, including a Firefox plug-in that helps organize travel content on the site from elsewhere on the internet. But it’s the Inspiration Finder that does something unique and interesting in combining the directional power of search with the serendipity of discovery.

BusinessWeek writes about Google’s potential plans to enter the travel arena with a specialized offering. That offering, assuming it appears, would likely include a heavy dose of video. There would also likely be a heavy helping of Maps. Interestingly, Google is pushing Maps and MyMaps today as a travel/trip planning tool.

Google could create a pretty interesting travel product using some combination of YouTube/video and Maps, including StreetView, with social elements (e.g., search UGC/MyMaps). Google used to show a one box that would expedite a search on the top branded travel destinations for queries such as “flights to NYC,” but I was unable to reproduce that today.

Online travel spending exceeds $80 billion annually in the US market; and online travel-related advertising (leisure) is one of the top consumer categories according to the IAB:

Vertical sites offer marketers a more qualified click than do general search results.