Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Troogle - by any other name

Look across to the right hand navigation bar and you’ll see a new function – a vertical travel search engine powered by Google.

Or, Troogle, as some of us have been calling it for a few months now. [“Obsessed”, is how one senior Google figure jokingly, we hope, described us today!]

In typical Google fashion, however, it is actually rather simpler than just being a travel vertical search engine.

Google Co-Op, the official title, is a service (in beta) that allows users to create their own engine and dictate which websites to search.

We have therefore created the Travolution Travel Search Engine, and embedded it into the Blog.

At the moment it searches around 20 different websites, including Lastminute.com, Expedia, Travelsupermarket, Kelkoo, Thomson, BA, Ebookers et al.

The significance of this cannot be underestimated. This is essentially a customised search engine that allows users to only search for products in websites of their own choosing – in our case, travel-related sites.

"Google Co-op was built to be scalable enough to cover a wide array of topics," says our Google friend.

"Our goal is not to focus on particular verticals. Instead, we’ve tried to create a system that can make information more discoverable across all topics.

"We want to point people to the most relevant and useful information on the web, not keep them on Google."

Let the debate begin...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

fantastic stuff. tried out a few comparative searches, using google.co.uk and the travo search engine. far better results. filtering is undoubtedly the way forward for travel search.

Anonymous said...

will be fascinating to see the take-up. obviously some restrictions because need google a/c to create.

Anonymous said...

also been trying it out. even with just a handful of favourite sites still get pages and pages of restuls. suspect the answer is to try and be as narrow as possible.