By Bill Furlong, CEO
As any of you who have attended Escapia's vacation rental breakfast seminar series know, we talk a bit in the session about the future of search and how it impacts vacation rental managers.
Search has gone through two major evolutionary phases over the past fifteen years. We are on the cusp of a third. Search 1.0 -- which was dominated by Yahoo! was about directing people to sites that covered the topic they were interested in. Much like a card catalog in a library, it was a manually maintained directory of web sites. In fact, you can still see that directory today. Here's what it looks like for vacation rentals, which are indexed under Directory > Business and Economy > Shopping and Services > Travel and Transportation > Lodging > Vacation Rentals
As content on web sites exploded, it became clear that directing people to the site that covered the topic the searcher was interested in wasn't good enough. Instead, search needed to match the topic to the underlying content on all those sites. And in came Search 2.0. While Yahoo! certainly evolved from the directory approach to the web page search paradigm, Google swept in and took leadership of search. And so search results began to look like the following:
During this whole period of search, I was working at Microsoft which, sadly (at least for me) hadn't figured out a way to take a leadership position in search.
And that brings me to where we are today -- the battle for leadership in Search 3.0. The search gurus will tell you that there are a lot of angles on the next evolution of search. Those who are enamored with Twitter and Facebook updates will point to the amount of real-time content being created and will say that the big evolution ahead is real-time search (i.e. how does a search engine show results to a search of "Lake Tahoe vacation rentals" that include things like a Twitter tweet written five minutes ago that says "we just stayed at an incredible home in Lake Tahoe. Here's the place www.blahblahblah.com ").
More important to vacation rentals (in my opinion) is the thread of Search 3.0 that says that what a search engine should do when you ask a question isn't point you to a site that covers that topic (Search 1.0) or to web pages that have a lot of information about that topic (Search 2.0) but instead should provide the information you want as directly as possible. In a recent interview with TechCrunch (alasjdfla), Google CEO Eric Schmidt basically said this is where Google wants search to evolve -- to providing answers, not just pointing to where you can find the information:
"So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time. Okay, you know, the question I’ll ask today, how many Americans have - what percentage of Americans have passports?…The Google’s answer was a site, which was somebody who had attempted to answer that question and had multiple answers. It’s quite interesting actually to read…So you go to a very good definitive site. And what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site and then summarize what it says, and answer the question…Along with the citation and so forth and so on."
In vacation rentals, Google has already begun doing so in selected places. Take Honolulu vacation rentals, for example. When you do the search, Google gives you a link to a page with the following listings...not just links to pages of listings but the listings themselves...
So what is the looming battle for Search 3.0? As you may have read, those scrappy guys in Redmond are trying to claw their way back into the search game with the recent launch of Bing.com which has been pretty well received. Their pitch to all of us is that Bing.com isn't a search engine, it is a decision machine. One of the top categories where they are trying to show what they mean by that is travel. Their acquisition a year ago of Farecast gives them the tools to provide rich information in the results themselves -- not just pointers to where you can find the results. Here's what a Honolulu hotel search result looks like in Bing.com:
Yes, it looks more like Expedia or Travelocity or Kayak than it does like Google. And therein lies one of the big Search 3.0 bets that Microsoft is making. Their view is that consumers will gravitate to a search experience that comes closer to providing answers, not just pointers to where you can find the answers. Based on Eric Schmidt's comments and the experience Google provides for Honolulu vacation rentals, they generally agree with that assessment. And that will make for one interesting battle for leadership in Search 3.0.
Our belief at Escapia is that, regardless of who wins that battle, vacation rental managers are best positioned for this next phase of search with a web hosted software solution that is optimized for distributing content, rates, availability information, guest reviews, promotions and for facilitating online bookings. That's a big driver in our R&D efforts as we continue to make our vacation rental software richer and richer.
