Yesterday, I gave a talk at a small customer seminar (um, it was the seminar that was small; the customers seemed to be of average height) for Fast, a remarkably successful search service provider. In his talk, the CEO, John Lervik, pointed in passing to ThisIsTravel.com, a travel site that aggregates customer and professional reviews from other travel sites. For example, the page about the Holiday Inn Select Opryland rates it 5 out of 10 on the basis of 25 customer reviews the site found at IgoUgo.com, TravelGuide.com, etc. It also pulls links out of Fodors.com and others. The page links back to each of those reviews. If I understand correctly, the reviews are each evaluated by hand in order to assign a numeric ranking (although the Fast engine also does automatic sentiment analysis…a tough computing task).

I find our continuing climb up the meta tree to be fascinating. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous travel metadata fastsearch thisistravel]

Categories: Uncategorized dw