From guest blogger Marsha Takeda-Morrison of Sweatpantsmom

The end of summer doesn’t mean the end of good times. (Although, if you talk to my kids, the end of summer and the beginning of the school year really does mean the end of good times, and any type of joyful existence, period.)  The next few months are filled with holidays and the celebrations that go along with them, not to mention festivals taking place throughout the city. Here are a few – check back here on the UpTake blog for other events to help you get over summer withdrawal.

Sawdust Art Festival  – The Summer Show is the main part of this Laguna Beach festival and takes place from June through August, but it really consists of several festivals that take place year-round.  Check out the Autumn Art Festival for first rate classes like Glass Blowing, Ceramics and Oil Painting.  Don’t miss the Winter Fantasy, which takes place over four weekends from November 22 through December 14 and features 170 artists and craftspeople creating, demonstrating and selling their original pieces, not to mention outdoor cafes and a visit with Santa!  Kill two birds with one stone and get your holiday shopping done here, too.

(By the time this post publishes, you will have just missed the Nisei Week Japanese Festival that takes place in Little Tokyo every summer.  But it’s worth noting for next year – mark your calendars for next August’s festival.)

The beginning of November brings several festivals celebrating Dia De Los Muertos or The Day of the Dead.  One of the biggest celebrations takes place at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and features theater performances, arts and crafts exhibitions and authentic Mexican cuisine.  This year’s event takes place on November 1st, from 4-11pm and admission is only $5 per person.  Celebrate the dead without giving up an arm and a leg.

DWP Light Festival – Not so much a festival as a magical celebration of the holiday season. An amazing light and motion display sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power that you can view either from your car or via a walking route (which they recommend.)  Part of the festival is the Reindeer Romp at the nearby L.A. Zoo which features live reindeer, hands-on arts and crafts and holiday shopping.  If you’ve never had a chance to see this awesome light show, make it a point to go this year – it’s worth the crush of cars and maddening crowds.  It makes my husband cranky just thinking about going, but once he sees how much the kids love it, he cheers up.  Most of the time.

Photo: Hollywood Forever presents Dia de la Muertos

Days before launch, we wondered if bloggers and users would understand the fundamental shift our site was making away from the “price & book model of online travel” to the real reasons people travel.

Vacation planning is rarely just about price. Most travelers have a vision in mind: from escaping the routine, seeking a new adventure, re-connecting with family or developing a budding romance. Uptake, of course wants to help people book (how much & when) but more than that, we want people to discover a trip based on who they are going with and why they are taking a vacation.

We also wondered if we had succeeded in simplifying the process. We wanted to offer an alternative to the standard travel planning process of visiting multiple sites before booking a vacation. Couldn’t that information be consolidated, organized and delivered to make it easier?

Since our public beta launch on Wednesday, we were pleasantly surprised by the attention we received from top bloggers and pleased they understood the power of one site aggregating information and organizing it for travelers who needed more than the lowest price to decide on a trip.

Here is what they had to say:
AppScout saw the power of capturing 20 million opinions and data from 1000 sites in one place, “Tired of searching through dozens of Web sites to find everything you need to plan the vacation of your dreams? Now with the public beta launch of UpTake (formerly called Kango; see our preview here), you can plan the trip of a lifetime all in one place–as long as it’s in the U.S, for now.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch suggests travelers use UpTake for specific types of trips, “If you are looking for ideas for a family vacation, a pet-friendly hotel, or the perfect place for a romantic weekend, try travel search engine UpTake.” They liked the SEO work we had done to help travelers get to the right page, right away– we realize most travel planners start at search and we wanted them to find us. “Google already loves UpTake’s results. To see its semantic SEO magic at work, try searching for “pet friendly hotels gilroy” or “family hotels” and the name of any city in California. A result with a Kango URL will likely pop up near the top.”

“ZDNet Blogs likes our hotel detail and our use of semantics to enrich the experience. “Digging into the detailed listing for the hotel itself, the site does a nice job of summarizing sentiment from across the main review sites.”

“It’s an interesting concept, and one that – in principle at least – does a good job of applying some semantic techniques to enrich the experience without forcing the traveler to interact much differently than they would with a regular travel site.”

Mashable! states that we are “quick to get you where you want to go and offers plenty of search refinements. They also said, “UpTake’s search engine is pretty much its best feature.”

Budget Travel thought we were “innovative.” “A revamped and renamed website has debuted today with a clever twist on travel planning. “They liked the design changes we had made since private beta, “UpTake has now become much bolder.”

They thought our theme based travel was easy to use. “Uptake also makes it easier for you to do “theme-based” travel searching, such as a search for “”girls-getaways” or “pet-friendly” in, say, Las Vegas.”

Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb discussed our approach to semantics, “The ontology is a lot more focused and the site also isn’t trying to answer specific questions, but rather attempting to semantically determine general concepts, such as romanticness or overall quality. The upshot is that the results are tangible and useful…Beng able to search millions of reviews and opinions and have a computer understand how they relate to the type of vacation you want to take is the sort of palpable evidence needed to sell the Semantic Web idea.”

Search Engine Land understood idea of aggregating opinions created trustworthy results, “It also presents ratings from third party sites side-by-side so that users can gain a consensus view of the hotel’s quality and service. This is very helpful because no single travel site can be entirely trusted.”

Les Explorers interviewed VP of Marketing, Elliott Ng about his vision on our site’s future, the changes in our blog and our deep involvement with the travel industry blogs known as the T-list.

Blissful Travel described us as a site where “you can search and find hotels anywhere in the U.S., read opinions from other travelers and also discover what to do at your chosen destination.” A nice summary.

TechBays stated “UpTake is a travel site that wants to be your first destination when planning for trips.”

Winser-Traveller calls us the, “One-Stop-Travel Service.”

Integration of Business Information Systems: Ibis Cluster discussed sentiment analysis, “One of the more recent Natural Language Processing Techniques Uptake applies is Sentiment Analysis, also referred to as Opinion Mining, which uses syntactic parsing to extract words to indicate, for example, favorable sentiment towards a hotel, such as “good time”, “fantastic view” or “relaxed atmosphere”, and distinguishes positive sentiment from negative sentiment.”

We appreciate the reviews, remarks and suggestions. We hope you take a look at UpTake if you want to search for the right vacation for you.

I just guest-posted this over at AltSearchEngines.com, so I thought I’d share this with the UpTake travel and search industry blog readers too. Enjoy!

UpTake.com: Alts Living in a Google World

Judging from the intellectually stimulating discussion I had with 30+ alternative search engines at the recent AltSearchEngines-sponsored meet-up in San Francisco, there is no question that a renaissance of innovation is coming from the Alts. Many founders of Alts seem to be motivated by the idea that “they can do it better than Google.” This is a great motivation during the stealth-R&D phase. But when it comes time to go to market and get site traffic, we at UpTake believe the Alts should follow this maxim, inspired by Madonna’s classic “Material Girl“:

“Living in a Google World

Some Alts kiss me, some Alts hug me
I think they’re o.k.
If they don’t give me proper traffic
I just walk away”

link to album image: http://www.madonna.com/bin/galImg/siteFiles/4820374586.

So Alts, don’t kiss and hug me with your advanced technology and buzzwords. Just deliver the goods: traffic!

Four Tips on how you can better live in a Google World

We at UpTake (formerly known as Kango), know that we are living in a Google world. As an AltSearchEngine, that means you need to play by the rules Google has set for the game, if you want to be found, and you want to compete. Here are four tips on how you can get more traffic in a Google World:

TIP ONE: Focus on crafting rich “search engine results pages” (SERPs) that look like category pages, not SERPs.

Does Google index Yahoo! and MSN SERP pages? Enough said. They have been crystal clear on this point: they don’t want to index your SERP pages either! So the solution is to provide rich, crawlable landing pages that don’t look like SERP pages. Here’s how we did it for San Francisco Hotels and Things to Do in New York. In addition to the typical search engine “blue links”, we added images, copy, and other useful information for our users. Focus on looking like Amazon or another e-commerce player that has successfully indexed pages in Google.

TIP TWO: Provide a browseable catalog that is organized in some sort of semantically logical fashion, so that other crawlers can crawl your site!

Chances are your search engine doesn’t create easily crawlable pages. This is not unique to search engines; it is also the problem of most dynamically generated Websites like e-commerce sites. Solve this problem by creating an accessible “browse-tree” [sitemap] of your pages, categorized in a semantically logical fashion. For example, we organize by states like Florida and New York, and cities like Orlando and Chicago. We also created category pages like Lodging and Things to Do. Don’t do a laundry list of alphabetically organized deep searches. Instead, look to e-commerce sites in your vertical to see how to organize your browse tree. Hint: just using a sitemap.xml is not enough!

TIP THREE: Get lots of links to your site! Be willing to talk about things that are interesting but not focused on your search engine.

We set out to create a great travel search application. But then we discovered that in order to rank in Google you need lots of inbound links! One of our founders applied his snarky sense of humor toward this with a satire “what if Google had to design for Google“. Then it got Sphunn. Then it got Dugg 4822 times! Then Battelle mentioned it. This blog post was our most popular, and most linked to post in the company’s history.

TIP FOUR: Have original content.

Have original content. One way to do that is simple-blogging. It may be strange to think that a SearchEngine should have a blog, but it should. A blog is an excellent way of putting your personality on the web, and attracting new customers through a more traditional method: subscription and word of mouth. Also Google will not crawl pages of content that are not original. If you are just displaying web content from other Websites (just like Google), Google will not want to show more intermediate navigational pages beyond their own SERPs. They want to actually take users to the rich content they seek. Therefore, you must also create rich content that address the keywords that people are using in order to attract them to your search engine through ranking on Google search results.

Summary

To be successful as an Alt these days, not only do you need a great search experience with unique technology, but also pursue a lot of other traffic strategies not really related to building that search experience to attract customers. Google has defined the rules. Our policy at UpTake is to learn them, love them, and give ourselves a great shot at success by living well in the Google world!

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.