With Google's recent introduction of City Tours and Favorite Places, speculation is rife that Google will 1) enter the travel market, 2) launch an online agency and become another Expedia, or 3) develop or acquire a metasearch engine to compete with Microsoft's Bing Travel.
Of course, travel and advertising insiders know that Google already is a huge travel industry player, having become a king-maker ever since it debuted Google AdWords in 2000 and acquired Applied Semantics and its AdSense product in 2003.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president of product management, spoke publicly last week about how Google intends to make its travel advertising, and advertising in other verticals, more effective.
'I think it is the case on the vertical side that there is a lot of opportunity to get incremental monetization gains where you can further qualify the leads better for the advertisers,' Rosenberg told analysts. 'So for example, the finance area and the travel area are areas where there's a lot of opportunity to do that, so that you end up putting more information in the ad and then incrementally getting more information from the customer so that you can further qualify whether or not the customer in the finance area is interested in a particular type of mortgage, and then you send them to an advertiser with whom they are more likely to consummate a specific transaction that that advertiser is willing to pay for. So there's a lot of opportunity there.'
But, clearly the early, but too-soon-to-call success of Bing and Bing Travel, may have caught the Googlers in Mountain View a tad off guard.
However, any Google further foray into travel is not just about Bing Travel, the metasearch and fare-prediction engine formerly known as Farecast.
After all, Google quietly unveiled Flight Links, a BookingBuddy-like flight-search engine, in October 2005 and at the time Google officials were adamant that Google would not enter the travel metasearch arena.
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Source - Dennis Schaal Blog
