Thursday, May 10, 2007

New recommendations in Yahoo Travel

Yahoo Travel launched a few nifty new personalization and recommendation features.

The site now tracks your search and viewing history and makes prominent recommendations for flights, trips, and hotels on the front page. In my case, it appeared to focus on one item in my history, viewing information about a city in Maui, and made several recommendations of other things in Hawaii.

The feature is a nice use of implicit personalization, making the Yahoo Travel site more useful and feel more friendly without requiring any work.

In my usage, the recommendations seemed a little too commercial, more like advertisements than helping me discover useful information, and a little too broad, showing recommendations for trips to New York and Los Angeles rather than focusing on my interests, but that might be a nit pick.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land posted a review of the new features that has some good details.

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