CEO tells the story of FindMyCarrots – the smarter travel search engine
What happens when you try to escape the spiraling daily to-do list? Does your mind wander to some far flung, abode of peace, only to add to the to-do list you are trying to escape? Does the stress of discovering your next vacation make you pick the first known “tourist”y place on the map, and the first hotel that seems to have a room to rent?
If the above feeling is all-too-familiar, you are not alone. We have been there many times over to the point of dreading the thought of researching our next vacation destination. We would dream big about our next vacation, spend days romanticizing about just the right place to visit, from an idea as vague as “adventure activities in California”, only to realize, we spread our net too wide and thin. People who have done adventure activities like river rafting, bungee jumping, hot-air ballooning or some such crazy stuff will be talking about the specific activity and we would have to know exactly what we want to do, for us to find what we are looking for. But, that ain’t fair, right?
If I have a dream, I should be able to have all the information at my fingertip in a way that I can understand and decide from. After all, the maze called internet has all this data available – and if only, there was a way to map this treasure trove of data to my queries, I would not have to launch into a treasure hunt that would give Robert Louis Stevenson (of The Treasure Island fame) an inferiority complex. We felt exactly the same and decided to do something about it.
We decided to use machine learning, augmented with geographical and meteorological information to help map your questions to the answers that are most relevant. Geographical information allows the machines to identify places, the regions and states where they belong and the distance between them, enabling searches based on regions, states, place names, and distance from a known place. Meteorological information allows us to provide information based on weather trends. While, natural language parsing allows us to understand the various tangible and intangible attributes of a place allowing us to find information like adventure activities or intangibles like romantic places based on what people have to say about these destinations in their blog posts and travelogues. We aspire to be your trusted friend who you can ask for information like “family friendly hotel in New York with good food, close to downtown” and not be shown business friendly hotels. Our sole aim is to take the drudgery out of your vacation discovery and planning, so, you start enjoying your vacation right from the moment you start thinking about it.
In order to make the finding of the hidden gem an experience worth looking forward to, we augment information about the places with the following:
- Weather trends, so you do not land up in the middle of a cold wave in your summer wear.
- How to get there, so, you do not have to spend hopping between 2 airports to reach the destination, while taking a ferry would have been cheaper and far more relaxing.
- What to do there, so you do not come back and kick yourself at having missed the hidden waterfall, because only the locals know about the place..
And once you have decided on the destination, hotel and mode of transport, book from the many options that our partner meta-search engines provide, so you do not stall your computer opening up umpteen tabs on your web browser searching for the best price for booking.
Our next frontier is to understand and help identify, for you, hyper local information so that a query like “Where should I go in Dallas Texas for shopping for boots and have Texican lunch at a restaurant that is a local favorite” yields results that are relevant. In terms of geographic coverage, we have India and the USA covered. We continue to dig for information in newer geographies so, you can rest assured that FindMyCarrots will find your travel carrots no matter which part of the earth, they happen to be hidden in.
By Arijit Mukherjee, CEO FindMyCarrots
About FindMyCarrots
FindMyCarrots is building the next-generation semantic search engine for the travel industry using Big Data and machine learning. It currently caters to India and supports holiday discovery and booking flights using semantics. FmC has crawled close to a million web pages and created a catalogue of more than 10,000 places of interest in India. To learn more, visit www.findmycarrots.com.