SubscribeKooxoo Launches Bundled Travel Search
Yesterday classifieds search engine Kooxoo formally launched travel search. It packaged several sub-channels including destination search, agent search, flight ticket and hotel search. The first two are new products, while ticket and hotel are existing ones.
The bundled service seems reasonable by covering destination research to real order of agent, ticket and hotel. The destination search as the first stop of travel planning takes an important role in this bundle. But, it may cause problems.
In this channel, Kooxoo is acting unlike a search engine by hosting content directly. For example, this is the search result for the West Lake. From top to the bottom, there’re three parts. The general description, available travel agents, and travel notes. These travel notes are mostly from personal blogs, now hosting directly on Kooxoo’s server, though link is provided.
So the truth of destination search is a human compiled directory. We understand that search technology is not yet available to tell an article is a travel note or not. Is this the best solution you can think of?
Not that no other search engine is hosting content. Baidu Guoxue is hosting content. The content it deals with is static, not widely available on the Internet. Google Books is hosting content. It does a great job by enabling offline content searchable. But travel notes are different. They are widely available on the Internet and growing everyday. This human maintained directory isn’t scalable in the long run.
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[...] Yougedi’s team blog hasn’t been updated after January. The traffic to the service also dropped to almost zero during the following months. It seems that there’s no dedicated real estate vertical search engine living now. Koubei has been cooperating with Taobao in its real estate channel since Dec. 2006. Kooxoo also has a big share in this market. [...]