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As you may well know by now, Google has announced a Social Search experiment on its official blog.

It scans your various profiles (Google Reader, Gmail contacts, Twitter followers &c) and serves up 'trusted' results based on them. Kevin May, late of this parish, has given it a try.

Previous social search experiments - such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's effort several years ago - have been more explicitly crowd-based, relying on the broad spectrum of users to organise results.

Google's focus on communities within the crowd, rather than the crowd itself, makes Wales's vision look rather quaint (funny what two or three years can do these days).

Is it worth noting that between these two experiments came the explosion of Twitter? Or do they just represent two different approaches that are still equally valid?

I've pitched this as an open post, so no more from me. Do your thing below...

Now you might have thought the Google trademark issue had just gone away especially when some of the protagonists of the major lawsuit backed away in the summer.

However, there were many who, when we wrote about it in our May edition, told us to watch this space especially post the summer downtime.

Low and behold, a statement from DialAFlight saying it is 'instituting legal proceedings against Flight Centre UK for infringement of its DialAFlight trademark on Google'.

Flight Centre says it has 'removed the phrase that says DialAFlight' but stresses it is not required to do so by Google and, perhaps more importantly, has not 'infringed any trademarks'.

Allegedly,

Forget how irritating this Google StreetView video is for a moment and think of the possibilities for hotels and destination services.



Kevin May, editor, Travolution

[Read down for updates]

Live blogging some bits and bobs this morning.

Just finished a speech at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage for Travel conference, titled "Challenge for Advertisers with Travel 2.0".

Plenty of nods in the audience when talking about ad budgets and engaging so-called Web 2.0 sites such as blogs and social networks. One of the people I spoke to when writing the speech said there is a real sense that experimental advertising is being reigned in, favouring the measurable - i.e. search and affiliate advertising - marketing campaigns.

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Lewis Lenssen of Netizen Digital: measure the effectiveness of offline brand campaigns with a strong pay-per-click advertising push.

Price and product are still king. If the product is poor you'll get found out still.

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Russell Gould, Thomas Cook:

The TCG ecommerce four-point plan - 1) customer acquisition 2) customer retention and growth 3) customer conversion 4) measurement and optimisation. Simple?

Engagement hugely important: maintaining contact constantly (and usefully) with the customer, primarily through email marketing.

Gould is "stunned" by the impact of video on conversion rates on thomascook.com. User who looks at video converts at 30% higher than those who don't.

40% of people that clicked on the recently Thomas Cook interactive magazine then went to the website, via the Book Now buttons.

Gould invites delegates to try the new Beta thomascook.com.

User reviews coming. Not Tripadvisor. Will use negative and positive reviews, will moderate against profanity, etc.

Best bit of the speech: personalised video demonstration.

Videos created live, simply by pulling together clips from the preferences put forward by the user. Very impressive.

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Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Not ready for the UK just yet (our Google guy tells us), but the predictive search function which has been knocking about for a few years under the title of Google Suggest is finally up and running on Google.com.

In simple terms, as a user enters a series of keywords into the main search box, suggestions and the number of results are included underneath.

NB: Google toolbar has had the feature for a while, minus the result count.

Analysis and more on SearchEngineLand.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

With a number of companies dropping out of the fight, some might suggest Google has got off lightly given that so many were hacked off with the search giant for its controversial

But will this be the end of the issue?

Following our story this morning, it appears some are determined to push the issue. Just a shame they won't go public with their ire...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Many searches on Google these days aggregate Google-related results, such as Youtube videos, Knol data and Blogger content - sites, which by amazing coincidence, have a high page rank.

Step forward Google Minus Google, a site which strips out the Google stuff and presents apparently pure internet search results.

But as one commenter on John Battelle's blog (hat-tip, ta), says:

I see that this site still contains ads by google!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Thankfully the headline is not a reference to the, er, classic Cliff Richard single from 1997, but describes quite nicely the results of the Oban Multilingual 'Face of Global Search' survey.

Following the release today of the survey looking at online travel search habits, Greig Holbrook, director of Oban Multilingual, has also penned some analysis of the results:

What the results clearly show is that travel search is a very culturally diverse activity and that search plays a huge part in both the research and purchase of holidays for global travellers.

The growth in Chinese on the web has been phenomenal and reflects the fact that over 900 million people on the web don't speak English (around 70%).

Ninety-nine percent of those people who took part in the research indicated that they have booked travel online at some point. This once again reflects the fact that globally, people are becoming increasingly familiar with booking their travel online.

This means that suppliers not only need to cater from them in their own language but also, as much as possible, allow them to buy successfully from the site. This means the sites need to be very well localised to reflect all search and online purchase behaviours.

Chinese travel searchers don't seem to want to use Google, often preferring their own engines like Baidu much more. With the huge increase in Chinese searchers actually buying online in 2006-2007, it makes more sense than ever to make sure that optimisation for China is focused on local search engines.

It is not surprising that travellers going to different place are looking for different web features. International travel searchers are becoming more specific in their online behaviours so that in addition to multilingual web optimisation, global social media optimisation also needs to take place. In this context, a site properly optimised social media that is visible to a variety of cultures will prosper.

The finding that those who look for multilingual websites tend to avoid Google reflects the fact that international searchers are increasingly demanding good quality multilingual sites which are visible in their own search engines and not simply on Google, as Google is very often not the preferred engine or method for sourcing travel bookings.

In terms of Spanish people travelling to the UK, we have already found that travel sites often fail to provide good optimisation in Spanish for visitors who are seeking to visit the UK.

Spanish people may use some English phrases to search or they may use Spanish, but very few travel sites provide them with the experience they need so they are often forced to use English sites.

There is a great opportunity for travel companies to tap into the demand for travel from Spanish searchers; both for holidays within Spain and for travelling elsewhere like the UK.

Greig Holbrook, director, Oban Multilingual

Silicon Valley loves a new product, especially when it reckons itself to be a Google challenger.

So there has already been plenty of hype about the new Cuil search engine, which has a fantastic pedigree amongst its founding exec team and - the launch clincher - an index of around 120 billion pages, around three times as many as Google, according to a FT report earlier today [link not available].

The engine has some good features and is displayed in an uncoventionial way (assuming Google is the status quo here for second).

For example, the keyword 'london' throws up the usual and relevant results and has a handy extra toolbar on the top-right hand corner which allows users to break down the results quickly into different categories types such as attractions, economy etc.

[Just forget for a moment that Ken Livingstone - pictured in the search results - is not in office anymore]



But we thought we'd also run a quick test, the ubiqutous search query 'flight new york london' to check what kind of results are coming in.

Alas, relevancy disappears entirely.


Type in "new york london flight", however, and you'll get 50 results.

We'll go back to playing around and report back.

Please feedback via the comments section any early impressions of Cuil.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: cuil search engine tom costello Anna Patterson

So plenty of coverage everywhere about the release of the latest Superbrands survey of top brands in the UK.

Google tops the list for the first time, ahead of Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz and the BBC.

In the travel-hospitality world, British Airways comes out on top (5th), with Hilton (20th), Eurostar (47th) and Virgin Atlantic (70th) all featuring in the top 100.

Thomas Cook has made a great PR play today with its top billing amongst tour operators and agencies in 72nd position, beating Kuoni (340th), Sandals (355th), Expedia (401st) and Lastminute.com (476th).

And this is where all this branding stuff gets murky and silly.

It was only last year that Expedia was named the coolest travel brand in the, er, Superbrands' Coolbrands list.

So, one question:

Is it better to be a 'cool' brand or a 'super' brand?

Anyway, back to the Superbrands list. Well done to Thomas Cook (which, according to marketing boss Simon Carter is "head and shoulders" above its competitors). But is it REALLY 46 places behind the Royal Albert Hall, for example?

Take this one step further and you could also ask the following question:

If the Royal Albert Hall is 46 places ahead of Thomas Cook, how on earth can Thomas Cook be at least 428 places higher than Thomson, its biggest and bitter rival and, let's face it, a fairly big travel brand in its own right.

[Thomson actually doesn't figure anywhere in the list of 500 brands]

And THAT is the problem with branding lists - not that Thomson doesn't feature, but that the results are so random when all evidence to the contrary (sales, adspend, offline and online presence, word-of-mouth and history) indicates that a company such as Thomson should at least have a higher ranking than Maltesers, Stannah Stairlifts and Nicorette!

There are plenty of people who have strong views about Superbrands et al - the comments button is dying to hear from you...

* The Superbrands selection criteria can be found on its website.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: superbrand