Kango just announced the launch of our private beta yesterday morning and we would like to know what you think of our site. Please sign up for a private beta invitation and let us know what you like and what we can improve.

We recognize we have a long way to go to achieve our vision of becoming your first step for planning your trip. We look forward to your feedback.

In the meantime, the blogosphere has started giving us their candid opinions:

• Dan Kaplan at VentureBeat says, we have built “a technology with a refreshing spin on travel search…so someone looking for a family vacation in, say, Big Sur will see a different set of results than someone seeking romance or adventure. Kango’s technology extracts the sentiment from the postings it indexes and only shows results for locations that get positive buzz. If you’re looking for activities, you can filter using a number of criteria, including theme parks, playgrounds, wineries and breweries, and spas.”

• Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch highlights that Kango “looks at travel reviews and other information across the Web and automatically generates tags so it can categorize results by how “kid friendly” or “romantic” they may be.”

• Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says ”if you have been waiting for social media to take on the travel industry, your wait is over” with Kango’s debut.

• Rafe Needleman of Webware (CNET) “found the search results page excellent” and that “the product philosophy makes sense.”

• Anne Zelenka from GigaOm says, “Kango could eliminate some of the multi-web site research that many vacationers undertake.”

But it’s not all rosy of course (otherwise we wouldn’t be in private beta!). Rafe points out that our search experience isn’t quite there, for example, we don’t cover surfing in Hawaii. Most bloggers commented that they would like Kango to cover more than California and Hawaii.

How do we do what the bloggers are talking about? We have aggregated and analyzed more than 20 million traveler opinions from more than 1,000 sites across the Web. We use natural language analysis and travel-specific term mapping to deliver reliable, relevant recommendations for you. This means you can now include subjective criteria like ‘romantic’ or objective criteria like price and ‘internet access’ and get relevant results.

With Kango, if you are looking for a romantic getaway in San Francisco, you will get different hotel and activity recommendations than if you are looking for a family vacation in San Francisco. We try to deliver search results by understanding your intention, so ‘good for kids’ is interpreted the same way as ‘child friendly’ or ‘family vacation’. The result of all this is Kango – a travel search application that helps you discover new travel choices and make better decisions.For more details about how and what we do, read more here.

We look forward to getting your feedback about how we can improve Kango.

Gene & I founded Kango to make it easy and fun for you to discover information about your travel options and to make better travel decisions. Our mission is for Kango to be your first step to a great trip.

Travel is the largest e-commerce category on the internet with almost $90 billion booked online in 2007. But you still have to buy travel online largely on the basis of “facts”, such as travel dates and price. However, you probably make many your decisions about where to go, where to stay and what to do based on “feelings” –subjective criteria for the kind of experience you wish to have. At Kango, you can discover the right options based on facts and feelings.

Unlike today’s travel sites, we allow you to shop for things to do as well as for lodging – for well-known attractions like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and for hidden gems that locals know about like Dennis the Menace Park. We enable you to get filtered recommendations for things to do and for lodging based on your subjective themes (e.g. romantic San Francisco hotels or family friendly things to do in San Francisco) rather than having to pick through a one-size-fits-all top 10 list.

Unlike web search engines like Google and Yahoo, we do “entity extraction” to organize structured information around specific activity and lodging products. For example, when you type in “Hotel Vitale Embarcadero,” Google returns 12,700 links to different pages on different sites. We return an integrated snapshot of the Hotel Vitale Embarcadero that include descriptions, photos, over 200 reviews, amenities, address and phone number from over 12 sources as well as the official hotel site.

We have a lofty vision about helping you discover the trip that is right for you. This can be a difficult task, like finding a (your) needle in the haystack. We realize we are just getting started. With this in mind, we welcome your feedback. Please sign up for private beta and let us know what you like and more importantly, what we can improve.