UpTake

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UpTake (formerly Kango) is a travel company building a semantic search engine to retrieve more appropriate leisure and business trip results. It is indexing 18 million opinions and reviews across 1,000 travel-related sites to derive the best travel search results based on what type of trip you want to take. It parses the language in these reviews and guides, and categorizes them by generating tags for them. So hotels that have been reviewed across the Web (on sites like Yahoo Travel, TripAdvisor, or Yelp) with words such as “perfect,” “relaxing,” “couples,” “honeymoon,” or “spa” would rank higher in a search for romantic travel. Hotels associated with the words “kitchen,” “pool,” and “kids,” would rank higher in a search for family trips.

Like many travel companies, UpTake has integrated with Google Maps, however what differentiates it from the rest of the crowd is its ambition to tag the travel vertical itself. For this job UpTake brought in Ebay’s search architect and a natural language scientist who previously worked for the British Government. Although the travel space is crowded, UpTake is a company to keep an eye on in the near future.

Competitors include: Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Farecast, TripHub, Yapta, TVtrip, hereorthere and others.

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Sources

1. Kango Raises $4M (silicontap.com) [edit]
2. TechCrunch (techcrunch.com) [edit]