Stealth Startup Kango Working on Semantic Search For Travel

Does the world really need another travel site? With Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Farecast, TripHub, Yapta, and many more, prospective travelers already have more than enough to choose from. (With an estimated $87 billion in travel booked online, it’s no wonder why). Soon they will be able to add Kango to that list.

The startup, which has been in stealth-mode until now, does manage to add a new twist to search travel. 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. If you are planning a romantic getaway in Big Sur, you will get one set of results. If you specify that you are looking for a family outing instead, you will get another. Or you can look for pet-friendly hotels and activities. Of course, you can also search by price or amenity, like any other travel site. And you can see where each hotel or activity is located on a small Google Map.

picture-204.pngBut what’s promising about Kango is the way it slices up search subjectively. Kango is building a semantic search engine focussed narrowly on travel. It parses the language in all of those reviews and guides, and categorizes them by generating tags for them. “You cannot wait for users to add tags, you have to derive them,” says CEO Yen Lee. 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.

Whether this will be enough to draw people from other travel sites is hard to say at this point. But Kango’s executive team has an impressive pedigree. Lee is a former general manager of Yahoo Travel. His search architect, Huanjin Chen, used to be the search architect at eBay. His natural-language search scientist, Boris Galitsky, used to do work for the British government. And his head of marketing, Elliott Ng, headed up marketing for Intuit’s QuickBooks and is the founder of Netcentives.

Lee estimates there are 6 billion to 8 billion travel-related searches done every year, and he thinks Kango can help expose more of the hidden gems in travel that today don’t quite make it to the first page of most travel sites. He plans to make money on travel-specific search advertising, rather than on booking or listing fees.

Kango will be rolling out a limited beta in the next few weeks, and is reserving 100 spots for TechCrunch readers who sign up here.

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Google Math: Buy $1,000 in Radio Ads, And We’ll Give You $2,000 Back

Here’s a good brain teaser for those famous Google job interviews: If you pay me $1,000, and I give you $2,000 back, how much profit does that leave me?

Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical question. It’s an actual promotion for Google’s radio ad network, known as Google Audio. That’s right, Google is offering $2,000 to any advertiser who spends $1,000 on a Google Audio ad campaign. The $2,000 comes in the form of a credit on future ad campaigns, but part of it still comes out of Google’s pocket since it needs to pay the radio stations who will run the ads. It amounts to a “buy one, get two free” offer and is good through the end of the year.

This is but the latest piece of evidence that, while Google may be golden in online advertising, its forays into off-line advertising have yet to catch on. Google must be having a real hard time selling those radio ads to have to resort to such a blatant attempt to buy market share. It’s not the first time it’s tried such tactics either. Last year, in an effort to jumpstart Google Checkout, for instance, Google paid $10 for every $30 in sales that merchants directed through its PayPal competitor. I’m not sure how well that went. But last time I checked, PayPal was still around.

Just because Google has cash to burn doesn’t mean it should use that cash to try to buy market share. If it truly has a better way of buying and selling radio ads, advertisers and radio stations will quickly figure that out on their own. It is not a good sign when Google has to resort to paying customers to try out a new product.

The Man In The Arena

Yossi Vardi is one of the people I’ve had the pleasure to get to know since starting TechCrunch. You can find him at technology events worldwide - just look for the smiling, wild-haired guy surrounded by a pack of people.

To understand what he has accomplished, see his wikipedia entry. He is most famous for being the original investor in ICQ, but he’s also invested in over 60 other companies.

Yossi was generous enough with his time to join our panel of expertes at TechCrunch40 last month. At one point in the discussion of a group of startups he quoted Theodore Roosevelt from a 1910 speech given in Paris, and drew an analogy to today’s entrepreneurs:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I spoke with Yossi this week and asked him about his investment approach. He generally invests in young entrepreneurs and only takes common stock. If someone has failed before he’s even more likely to invest - “It makes them want to win even more,” he said. He generally doesn’t look at business plans at all, and just invests in the individual.

I am not nearly as eloquent as Roosevelt or as smart as Vardi, but the words ring true to me, and it was a very special moment at the conference when Vardi spoke about this. If you are an entrepreneur (or think you may be), forget the critics (even us) and the naysayers and just do what your heart tells you to do. You may be wasting your time, but at least you got into the arena. And if you fail, make sure you fail while “daring greatly.” Then, get into the arena again, having learned from your mistakes.

Tailrank 2.5 Launches. It Still Falls Short

Tailrank founder Kevin Burton notified us that version 2.5 of his news aggregation site has launched, as well as a new version of the engine behind it called Spinn3r. We’ve taken a look at the new site, and in our opinion it still falls short of being a useful application.

We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).

So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.

We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.

Attendi Wants to Search Inside Your Head

As if the more than 20 billion Web pages out there aren’t enough, a new startup coming out of stealth mode today called Attendi has come up with a new twist on “people search.” This is not to be confused with the type of people search that Facebook is getting into (actually searching for people—see also Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou), or the type of people-powered search results that Mahalo, Wikiasari, and others are exploring (also known as social search). Actually, Attendi could more aptly be called chat search because it wants to search what’s in people’s heads as expressed through online chats. Attendi is launching at DEMO fall.

Attendi is half a social network, and half a knowledge database. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Members, known as “Attendis,” will create profiles on the site describing their areas of expertise, hobbies, and interests, as well as adding links to their blogs, social networks, or simply Websites they identify with. The site, which opens in beta today, dynamically creates tags that define what each person knows and cares about (they can also add their own tags). It is built on top of the Lucene open-source search engine, and the Jabber instant-messaging protocol.

When someone searches for a topic on Attendi, what comes back as results are profiles of other “Attendis” whose tags match the search request. And if they happen to be online at the moment, even on another IM system, the other person can initiate a chat discussion with one of them to ask questions about that topic. “Attendi will just be a way to broker your availability,” says CEO Drew Rayman. Every chat is archived, indexed, and becomes fodder for future search results.

Attendi is based in New York City, and Rayman is also the founder of an interactive ad agency called i33. He plans on selling search ad sponsorships based on Attendi topics, as well as a live chat ad unit that only pops up when a company’s online customer service rep is at the ready to do a hard sell through IM. It’s that kind of in-your-face advertising, though, that might drive people away from an IM-centric search engine and never give it a second chance.

Making topic-specific IMs searchable is certainly a novel way to create a knowledge database. But Attendi faces a huge hurdle in getting anybody to actually use its system. What’s the incentive? There is no existing network of super-smart Attendis anyone would want to tap into. One way around this chicken-and-egg problem, though, would be to take advantage of free advice that tens of thousands, if not millions, of people are already giving away for free online in the form of comments that people leave on blogs. There is no easy way to search across those. (Startups like Big Swerve, which was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit, are already onto this).

Bloggers today install search boxes from Google or Eurekster to allow readers to search through their posts. Why wouldn’t they also install a way to search comments if it were available. Attendi would be better off trying to build such a service to gain traction for its technology. It could offer a way to power comments for blogs that would make those comments searchable both on that blog alone and across all Attendi-powered blogs. That way, those people who leave their opinions across the blogosphere in the form of comments would surface in Attendi search results. Tapping into blog comments would be a great way to seed its knowledge network.