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.

UPDATE: 10:15 AM – thoughtful coverage from AltSearchEngines (interview, announcement), ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, The Semantic Web, Search Engine Land, AppScout, Creative Think, Mashable, Washington Post, Budget Travel, Blissful Travel, TechBays, CNReviews (Elliott’s blog), L-Experiences, Moraaz.org, E-Marketing, Winser-Traveller, Ibis Cluster, Rootly, NoBosh, Les Explorers, MarketWire, Zedomax Network, Texas Word Tangle, WebGuild, ChristineLu, Wandalust, HomeExchangeTravel, FlyAway Weblog, WebSearchGuide.ca, WebWorkerDaily, WebGuild, ZedoMax, JourneyEtc, more to come. We’ll post later this week with responses to all the feedback we are getting from the blogosphere!

This morning, we’ll be celebrating the opening of UpTake to the public!

We created UpTake so you can sit in that beach chair above, having a great vacation, confident you made the very best decisions you could with your scarce time and dollars!

What’s new with UpTake?

UpTake [logo], formerly Kango, is a travel search application that helps travelers make better decisions by providing recommendations based on analyzing over 20 million opinions from thousands of websites. More details are on our press release. Here’s what’s new:

• UpTake now covers the entire United States–over 20,000 destinations across the 50 states.
• We’ve got the largest travel database on the Web, with over 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions.
• We’re launching two more themes: “girls-getaways” and “pet-friendly.” [screenshot] Just like our original “romantic” and “family friendly” themes, these ratings [screenshot] are driven by our database of 20 million opinions
• Launched new check rates button to check rates at multiple booking engines. [screenshot]
• Home page is simple and relaxing! [screenshot]

If you’re a blogger, journalist, or just curious, we have lots of other info here, including our logo, releases, our RSS feeds, quotes, company timeline, bios, photos, recommended travel blogs, and my Twitter account!

Some example searches for you to try…

Feel free to just go to the home page and start searching! Or if you want to jump right to a couple examples, look at: San Francisco Hotels, San Francisco Family Hotels, San Francisco Family Things to Do.

…or you can just watch this video (thanks DemoGirl).
We still want your feedback!

Our U.S. hotels search is in “beta” and our U.S. activities is still in “almost beta” as we add more data sources and activity types. So keep the suggestions coming so we can build a truly great travel search site.

On behalf of co-founders Yen Lee and Gene McKenna, I want to thank all of you for your support and help!

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!

VentureBeat calls us “opinions super-site.” I like it, even though I didn’t come up with it.

VentureBeat just posted a great overview of the information out there on UpTake (formerly Kango) to date while we’ve been in private beta, and shared (with our permission) the launch date, May 14. We’re getting close! The team is really excited!

The post called us an “opinions super-site” for travel. I like it! I love this description and wonder why none of us ever thought of this term! But, in fact, that is exactly what we are doing: aggregating opinions and word of mouth. This is open-source marketing at its best…

This post is a great close to our private beta period, and I’m getting nostalgic about this period already!

…and some thoughts on press and blogger outreach since that’s what I’m doing right now before our May 14 announcement

As we’ve been moving into high gear in preparation for our launch, we’ve been touching base with a diverse group of mainstream media, tech and travel industry press and bloggers. For other startups, I would like to propose this:

Elliott’s proposed Golden Rule of PR and Blogger Outreach:

If you don’t think you can learn something from a reporter or blogger, then you probably shouldn’t be pitching them.

In figuring out who to contact, I’ve been asking myself these Golden Questions:

1. Can I learn anything interesting by reading their blog?
2. Are there posts that relate to our story? If they wrote about us, what other previous posts on their blog could they link to?
3. If I were them, what would my post be about? How would I make it unique and fit the focus of their blog?

This is much harder work than a massive email blast. But back to the Golden Rule. Talk to people that you can learn from. Don’t talk to people that have nothing to teach.

Pitchmeme: Teh tricky new world of pitching bloggers and media

I’ve been on Twitter following the growing “pitchmeme” of bloggers complaining about PR people. Follow enough people on Twitter and you’ll hear the complaints. So for all the other startups, let me save you some pain and suffering and provide you with some pointers on how to pitch and how not to pitch from bloggers and the experts themselves:

Brian Solis

If you only read 1 post, read this one from Brian Solis. He sums up the opinions of Marshall Kirkpatrick, Adam Ostrow, Tom Forenski, Robert Scoble, Merlin Mann, and Allen Stern. Guess what? They all want you to do something different! Read this post!

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb

In Five Wrong Ways to Pitch RWW and One Great Way, Marshall outlines these 5 no-no’s:

1. Email the wrong email address
2. Phone calls
3. Twitter, Especially DM
4. Facebook
5. IM

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS. Wow. A great idea. Bloggers live inside of Google Reader. Why not send them info via RSS feedreader? Of course this doesn’t handle embargo’ed news like what we will be announcing May 14!

By the way, if you really want to irk ReadWriteWeb, call them “RRW” instead of “RWW”!

Louis Gray

If you’re pitching Louis Gray, you can only pitch me in reverse polish notation or pig latin. Louis is one of my favorite bloggers but the UpTake story just doesn’t fit into his coverage area of RSS addicts, FriendFeed addicts, Twitterholics, and the earliest of the early adopters. He covers Stowe Boyd, Robert Scoble (2007), and Marshall Kirkpatrick’s directions.

So what do we have here, just in these three examples? We have three prominent bloggers with three very highly differentiated, inefficient ways of soliciting engagement with public relations and companies…

Do you really think companies are going to remember to pitch Marshall at ReadWriteWeb via RSS and Stowe Boyd by TwitPitch and Scoble by Facebook? Knowing PR companies, I know they won’t. Most of them still believe in the spray and pray method of e-mailing all contacts under the sun. There needs to be change, but making everybody jump through hoops while losing the personal engagement, exclusivity and timing won’t work.

Anyway, Scoble (2008) moved on from Facebook and now wants to get the pitches by Twitter. But not DM in twitter, @ message him. And if you don’t know what I just said, you’re hosed cause you aren’t on Twitter!

Chris Brogan

On What Tom Could Learn from Facebook, Chris gently chides Tom of Cxxxx who blasted him an embargo’ed press release without permission: “Opt in. SOCIAL network. It’s about getting to know me before you fart in my face.”

Chris then offers some insight (with my paraphrase) into Some Differences Between Pitching Mainstream Press and Bloggers:

• Bloggers often write from passion. This is a huge insight. Many bloggers do it as a labor of love for the topic. This can be different from some journalists covering a beat in a professional capacity.
• Bloggers have a bit more ego feeding required. take an effort to understand “what makes a certain blogger tick,” accordin to Chris.
• Bloggers like free prize inside experiences. What can you do to give me something special?
• Bloggers don’t have to be polite. (Then again I don’t have to pitch impolite people!)

TIP FOR MARKETERS AND PR PEOPLE: Best way to really grok this is to just start blogging. That’s what I did at CNReviews on China-related topics that have nothing to do with UpTake.

Rafe Needleman

Simple. Use email. Don’t use Facebook. And no matter what don’t use Plaxo!

Adam Ostrow

Adam Ostrow of Mashable and ReadBurner fame offers 12 tips for getting your Statup Featured on Mashable:

1. Be a cool product
2. Fit into Mashable’s “coverage universe”
3. Have not already been covered to death elsewhere
4. Submit to our Startup Review series
5. Personalize your pitch
6. Be concise
7. Come to our events…and pitch us your story in-person

He also offers 12 things not to do when pitching a story to Mashable:

1. Sending an invite from your app
2. referencing your media coverage on Mashable Competitors X, Y, Z
3. Private Message on Social Network
4. Trying a Backdoor…in other words, use their intake email at news@mashanble .com
5. Contacting Pete.
6. Unsolicited Phone CAalls
7. USING ALL CAPS
8. Misspelling our Names. Kristen Nicole i s Kristen, not Nicole. and Not Kristin either.
9. Trying to Setup a Lunch.
10. Not Including a URL
11. Not Offering a Preview of Your Private Beta
12. Pitching Old News.

Great advice, Adam.

CityMama

Here’s a Johnson and Johnson Blogger Relations disaster. Don’t throw an all-expenses paid blogger junket for Moms called Baby Camp and then disinvite bloggers for needing to attend BlogHer, having a breastfeeding baby, or a slung baby.

Stowe Boyd and the Twitpitches.

Don’t pitch Stowe Boyd except via Twitter. And here’s how:

Basically, I want companies to get their story down to a one-liner ‘escalator’ pitch — like 10 seconds long — which is going to force them to drop the superlatives and buzzwords and get to the heart of the matter.

A twitpitch takes the following form:

1. A twitter message of the form “@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
2. A second, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. Just one URL, please.
3. A third, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch”.

That’s it.

Twitpitches that work — that interest me enough to warrant spending some time to find out more — will be retwittered on my @stoweboyd account, and here on my blog.

OK, not sure how this works for embargo’ed news. I’m confused. So I guess we won’t be talking to Stowe until the press release is out! Or maybe I’ll try twitpitching and just see what happens.

Fellow startup entrepreneurs, welcome to the new world of the pitchmeme! And watch out for our news on May 14!