There’s again new data on consumers being unsatisfied with their online travel experience while satisfaction in e-commerce generally rose to an all time high. According to the report online travel players have difficulty in differentiation. This is no surprise. Everyone researching and booking travel online probably knows the difficulties: there’s just too much information both when it comes to booking options and finding information. One of my favorite travel blogs has a good story on this and how it affects the evolution of online travel. I’m talking about travel here as it’s what we at Vailoma are working on but the same problems I believe apply to most verticals of the internet.
Social search is one of those hot (too hot?) topics offering help to this information overload stating that the wisdom of the crowds solves the problems of search and produces better results than algorithmic search such as Google. The good old Del.icio.us belongs to that category and the latest entrant to this area is Delver for which you can read an interesting review here. Delver tries to alter your search results based on your social network connections.
User generated content is considered by some as the holy grail of information surpassing edited content as the most interesting and trusted content on the web. However, some parts of UGC are junk and some just not interesting, even within a certain very narrow topic. The same is true for edited content. It’s not that there isn’t enough information, it’s about the findability of that information according to your personal needs and interests. Who cares if I can read a hundred edited reviews and ten thousand consumer comments on a certain vacation destination if I don’t know how to find the ones that I should read?
So what do these things have in common? How do search, social networks, information overload and a deteriorating user experience in online travel relate to each other? One could say that the deteriorating user experience is the symptom, information overload is the disease and search is the penicillin that is not working as well as it used to. What, then, would be the new cure? How to make sure that we’re taking care of the disease instead of the symptom?
Advocates of social search say that people will produce better search results than Google. That may be true in some cases but there’s just the small problem of the mind blowing amounts of data produced each year. 161 exabytes was produced in 2006 and 988 exabytes will be produced in 2010 according to IDC. Exabyte is a billion gigabytes. During the years that compounds to one enormous pile of data. Who has the time to sort through all that?
Facebook believers claim that as we now have Facebook we won’t need any other social networks anymore as everything will concentrate around Facebook. When someone funds a social network of some kind these guys and the media are quick to label those networks as “yet another social network” just copying Facebook. Perhaps I’m just old but I don’t understand how those generic social networks like Facebook can help me in finding stuff that I’m interested in. Or help me find anything interesting for that matter. It can be a great platform to build on, though, as it has a huge number of users.
I don’t like the millions of hits provided by Google when I search for something but likewise I don’t like the idea of getting a long list of links recommended by random people who might or might not be interested in the same things as I am. For all I know the results might resemble the headlines of tabloids: generally masses of people consider them to be interesting (at least they sell the papers) but in reality they are just pure garbage. I want something better.
Why not combine all the best parts of these different approaches and use existing services as a platform to build and spread? I’m thinking about combining Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Google (search and maps), Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and Expedia with a twist of Amazon-like profiling and recommendation engine as a solution for the travel vertical. You get everything from finding inspiration to making a purchase at a single site without ever seeing the vast amounts of information available. No more information overload or paradox of choice.
Of course we’re not there yet but that future might be closer than we generally believe. I’m not going to guess who will win the game but we at Vailoma will do our best to offer a great solution for the travel vertical. ;)
