People have been talking now about the semantic web and how it will revolutionize the search engine businesses for quite a while. Personally, I have not given too much thought on this entire “semantic search business”, as I have always felt that my searches were quite “unsemantic” and more directed to websites that I already knew (like “kayak amsterdam” or “tripadvisor amsterdam reviews”). However, I have to admit that my search patterns have changed over the last months and my searches are getting way more complex. Recently I find myself writing or copying entire sentences into Google – with varying results. Yet, we have the big Google competitor Bing now on the scene, so today I tried how well both search engines handle “semantic” searches in comparison.For starters, I tried out a search that is in my opinion very ordinary semantic search and quite important to the online travel industry. I decided to look for a hotel in Amsterdam next week, thus entered “book hotel in amsterdam next week”. The result in Google and Bing is quite sobering:

"Book hotel in Amsterdam next week" on Bing

"Book hotel in amsterdam next week" on Google

I don’t know whether I am too demanding here, but none of the searches are presenting my anything in particular for next week. No special deals, no availability information – really nothing in particular. I could have just left it out and just searched for “hotels in amsterdam”. Even more interesting is that none of the Ads even recognize that I want to go next week and thus promote special deals. I mean really, for all the money hotel websites pay their online marketing agencies, someone could have at least thought about targeted ads concerning dates and times.

Furthermore I thought it was quite interesting how very different hotel companies pop up on either Google or Bing as first results, which once again demonstrates the power of the search engine to specifically promote sites optimized to their standards. It’s quite funny how Bing ignores Booking.com, which is by far the No.1 hotel platform in Europe by now.

Within the last days the GetYourGuide team spent a considerable amount contacting Guides in some of the major European cities, such as London, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam. We have talked to many tourguides and agencies and have received a lot of positive feedback, which is very motivating for us going ahead to releasing an even more convincing Beta-Version. We also learned that there are many enthusiastic and motivated individual guides that love to use the service. Hence, we plan to design the Beta Version in a way that integrates tour providing organizations and individuals.

Additionally, we plan to seek cooperations with IT service providers (e.g. Rezgo) in order to offer guides not only increased marketing capacities but also a fully developed back-end. A major challenge will be to find an appropriate solution for comprehensive online and offline booking management. Although companies such as Rezgo have already presented first feasible solutions, we believe that there is still a long way to go. But the sprout is growing, for the rest it should just be a matter of time.