Google Hates Hotels

September 9th, 2004

Filed under:
Technology

Google Hates Hotels

Have you ever tried to search for a particular hotel on Google? Say you stayed there before and want to find it again. Or someone recommended it to you. The problem is that when you search for a hotel in Google, the hotel’s actual site is superseded in the search results by a ton of highly-optimized dodgy discount hotel vendors.

I was going to write in praise of the hotel I’m staying in in Dublin, the Alexander. I tried to search for it, but a scan through the first three pages of results didn’t turn up the hotel’s site. Obviously this isn’t a problem if you want to stay at a Holiday Inn, but I generally prefer independent hotels or small chains. I can’t really blame the hotels–you can’t expect every one of them to dedicate time and effort to beating out the results competition.

There are other categories of search terms that suffer a similar fate, but I can’t think of any at the moment.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

Andrea
September 9th, 2004
3:55 pm

Darren, if you take “google” out of your search terms and just leave the rest of the keywords, the Alexander hotel is #2 and #3 in results. Like a lot of hotels, it appears to be part of an international chain — in this case, O’Callaghan’s hotel chain. The hotel’s actual site is #1 in Yahoo and #2 in MSN. It doesn’t come up in Google right away, because they don’t appear to know how to optimize for Google (PageRank = 0!).

Most hotels appear on their corporate chain pages, which aren’t optimized for Google. It wouldn’t take a lot of thought to make the actual hotel or even the right hotel page show up in Google, but legit accommodations companies seem to have overlooked this.

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Jeremy C. Wright
September 9th, 2004
8:04 pm

I’ve found it works well if you do a 2-level search: hotel name + city.

In your case that’d be: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22alexander+hotel%22+%22dublin%22

Again, I found it as the first result in this case. And it generally works whenever I know the name and city of a hotel. Drilling down is one of Google’s strongest points.

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