Expedia and Filtered Search Results
January 10, 2011
Expedia must have learned how to throw temper tantrums from infamous JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater. After American Airlines pulled out of online travel booking site Orbitz, competitor Expedia began hiding the airline’s results in their own searches.
Techdirt reports in “Expedia Against ‘Search Discrimination’… Unless It Gets to Do the Discriminating” that this response is rich considering Expedia is a leading member of FairSearch, a group dedicated to fighting search discrimination (mainly that proposed by Google’s acquisition of ITA software.
Here’s a snippet: “So, just as Expedia, in an attempt to complain about Google, claims it’s against search providers discriminating by manipulating results to promote or punish certain players, it’s doing so in a way that’s significantly more noticeable than anything Google is doing…To complain about this exact form of discrimination, while doing it in a way that’s much more noticeable than the one you’re complaining about? That’s pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.”
Is this the end of objective search results as we know it? Maybe but when people run a search on one of today’s big systems, data not in the result set may not be missed? Will consumers know to run a separate query to locate the “missing” information? Whom does filtering “help”?
Christina Sheley, January 10, 2011
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