
Ask HN/Google: should Google link to hotel sites instead of aggregator sites? - petervandijck
You can expand this question to generalize: should Google link to, say, a tripadvisor hotel page first, or to the hotel website first? Whenever I search for a hotel or something, I always get a long list of aggregators, which I don't particularly enjoy. Hotel sites (however bad) would be better.<p>And more in general: should Google generally link to business sites (however bad) first, or link to aggregator sites (including their own) first?<p>I'm sure they could figure it out algorythmically.
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Udo
It has been my experience that more often than not, aggregator sites don't
provide any value whatsoever because their only mission is to display ads and
drive traffic by spamming Google's index. At least travel adviser sites offer
_some_ benefit if they host real reviews (instead of just showing scraped
content like the hotel's address and some images).

This is one symptom of a larger problem where I feel Google search is falling
flat and the quality of search results is getting progressively worse. It's
not the fault of the aggregator sites themselves, either (though some of them
employ very shady SEO tricks) - instead I believe the problem is that Google
search increasingly ignores specific user input to serve up "what I most
likely meant as opposed to what I actually typed in". I would welcome a return
to stricter search phrases and maybe a few options regarding what search mode
I would like to use. For example, it would be nice to be able to explicitly
include or exclude aggregator sites in search results. By now, Google
certainly knows enough about the nature of the URLs it indexes, they should
pass this knowledge on and empower their users to make more specific queries.

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paganel
> aggregator sites don't provide any value whatsoever because their only
> mission is to display ads and drive traffic by spamming Google's index

Tripadvisor has been really helpful to me and my wife, as in we don't go to
any new hotel without first checking its ratings and comments on tripadvisor.
You cannot have that on a hotel's website, objective reviews I mean, nor can
you have actual non-photoshopped pictures taken inside said hotels.

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webwright
Seems like "drake hotel" ought to get you to the Drake Hotel web site. "drake
hotel reviews" ought to get you to an aggregator. "drake hotel reservations"
ought to get you to whichever has the better prices.

Google's emphasis on domain name helps a lot here, though a lot of hotels are
owned by holding companies and have domain names like:
<http://holdingco.com/hotelname> (hard to differentiate between that and an
aggregator URL).

It comes down to inbound links-- and the aggregators have armies of people
doing link-building SEO work. I don't envy Google. Short of human editors, how
would you fix it?

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cletus
Hotels online are a bit of a mess.

Personally I'll go straight to Tripadvisor to find a hotel in an unfamiliar
area. I may book there but I will also _call_ the hotel in question,
particularly when my company has a corporate rate. Not because the corporate
rate is betteer but because when the website tells you the hotel is full for
the requested dates a person at the hotel will tell you what dates are the
problem and possibly bump you up to a higher room class to make your stay
possible.

As an aside to people who develop hotel aggregates:

1\. Never make me register;

2\. When I search a date range show me, for each day, the rate, availability
and include all room classes. This way I can easily see if a single day is the
problem and adjust accordingly.

In fact I'd like to combine the hotel and flight so one _one page_ I can see
flight costs on my requested dates (+/- 2 days) and the matrix of per day
rates and availabilities.

All sites I've seen have these as too many separate steps. What's worse,
refining the search can be problematic.

As for Google search results, this is one area where there is simply too much
noise. Hotel affiliate programs combined with cheap hosting mean thee are
234245556345 aggregators, almost all of them useless and hotel sites, except
for the largest chains generally, tend to be useless.

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dageshi
Depends if the aggregator has reviews from previous customers or not, if they
do then I would say it's a better source of information than the hotel website
itself. Google probably thinks your more likely to be searching for reputation
information on a particular hotel than stuff like "address" e.t.c.

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gyardley
Interesting, because I prefer the aggregator sites.

The aggregator sites usually contain some user reviews as well as a
standardized UI - one I'm already familiar with - for booking a room. On the
larger aggregators, I've also already got an account with some of my booking
information saved. I also believe (perhaps irrationally) that buying through a
large aggregator is more secure than buying through some random hotel site's
booking solution.

If Google were to bump TripAdvisor in favor of direct links to hotel sites,
Google would become less useful for me.

The same is true, as an aside, for restaurant websites vs. Yelp.

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petervandijck
The problem with the aggregator sites is that they tend to hide links to the
original site, email addresses and phone numbers, in order to get you to book
a room through their system.

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gyardley
Of course, and that's how it should be. They've added the value, so they
should make the money.

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rst
This one's debatable. I actually look at tripadvisor before the hotel's own
web site for the reviews, and information on other nearby properties. (Hotels'
own web sites are often... aspirational: <http://www.oyster.com/hotels/photo-
fakeouts/>) That said, I do look at the hotel's own site too, but I've never
personally seen a case where it wasn't on Google's first page.

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tgflynn
Does Google capture and use data on which of its search links people actually
click on ? It seems like that information would be a very useful adjunct to
PageRank for ranking search results.

They could then determine an optimal ranking by maximizing the likelihood that
the user will click on the top result presented.

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petervandijck
In fact, I believe they even capture how many users click a result and then
quickly come back (back button), which indicates a result that looks good in
the search results list, but that is disappointing when users actually view
the page.

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JamesDB
Aggregators provide a lot of use.

Gives an instant overview of the hotels prices and ratings. It would take a
long time to research just that basic information for say 10 hotels in an
area.

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decasoft
Another question: Would it be unfair for Google to redirect to a page where
it's making money (via affiliate link)?

