Hey All,
We launched a beta version of our travel discovery/planning startup, FindMyCarrots in Sept.
Consider the natural thought process of any human, thinking of a vacation. It is more like ‘I want a Christmas holiday on a beach with our little daughter’, instead of a checklist such as ‘4 star hotel, swimming pool, gym etc’. In natural language queries like these, the context of terms is important. Most of these terms will not be in any hotel description, so keyword searching will not give relevant results. By using the word ‘beach’, the inference is that the person wants to go somewhere warm or next to water. ‘Our daughter’ will likely mean there are two adults. ‘Little’ might also infer the need for childcare onsite. Such an understanding of queries requires Semantic technology.
No search engine/OTA currently provides this. A query like “hill stations in north east india” on iXigo does not show relevant results. Google shows links that need a lot of time to go through and filter relevant results. MakeMyTrip and Yatra do not allow a search!
Even the TripAdvisor CEO Acknowledges this problem currently in the travel industry (https://skift.com/2013/10/18/tripadvisor-roadmap-wants-travel-cycle/).
FindMyCarrots uses semantic technology to help customers discover, plan and book their next destination, all in a visually intuitive interface. It offers the following features:
- Semantic Search Queries – You can enter queries such as “Hill stations in north east india”, “national parks in western india”, “beaches 300kms from bangalore”, “Places to see in new delhi”, “scuba diving in india”.
- WWW Content – FindMyCarrots crawls the web and applies semantics to generate content on destinations, activities and very soon, hotels.
- End to end solution, actionable results – Provides multiple pieces of information to cover the inspiration,planning and booking stages of travel – description, images, TripAdvisor ratings, modes of transport, hotel bookings, weather.
- Semantic summary of reviews – Coming soon! No more going through hundreds of reviews of hotel properties. We plan to aggregate the review content and provide a summary.
If this sounds interesting to you, do check out our website at www.findmycarrots.com, and our FB page at – www.facebook.com/findmycarrots. We would love to get some feedback and comments!
PS: Some sample queries and an explainer video on the features is also listed on the home page. One feature which has stood out and got rave reviews is the circle expansion. (Try giving “Chennai” and expand the circle to have some fun).
Cheers,
Kanwar Sangha