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Travel sites get smarter, move beyond price

February 21, 2008 | Online Travel

Originally created as bare-bones comparison-shopping tools, next-generation meta-search sites are now letting users refine their searches through the filter of relevant intelligence.

Six to eight billion — according to Yen Lee, a former Yahoo! manager and now president of Internet start-up Kango.com, that’s approximately how many travel-related searches are conducted in North America each year on the Web’s major search engines.

Unfortunately, there’s no comparable data on the results of those searches. Some, no doubt, set the stage for happy travels; others, for nightmare experiences. And it’s all but certain that some led potential travelers to throw up their hands at the information overflow and the difficulty of extracting the significant from the spam.

Help, however, may be at hand thanks to developments at several leading meta-search sites. Originally created as bare-bones comparison-shopping tools — meta-search sites aggregate price data from multiple sources — sites like Kayak.com and Mobissimo.com are now letting users refine their searches through the filter of relevant intelligence.

Get the full story at MSNBC

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