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Useful Search Tips for Holiday Travellers

Felix — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:03:00 +0000

As the holiday season nears, many people are no doubt planning for their trip away from the city, and the Internet and Search Engines are often the first port of the call when people start to research and plan their trip.

It’s no secret that the Internet is a fantastic resources to search for cheap airfares, holidays ideas and accommodation recommendations. The mix of extensive commercial contents and user supplied material means that as long as you know where to look and how to find the right information, you can really leave nothing to chances when it comes to planning for your next trip.

Here are a few tips that I have used over the years to help me take trip planning to the next level and help me plan for the perfect trip by leveraging the power of the Internet and Search Engines!

Bing Travel Search

If you live in the USA or are traveling to and from USA, the Bing Travel search engines have some cool features to help you sort our your airfares. Whilst many website allow you to search for the cheapest flight tickets, one of the big feature of Bing Travel search is the ability to predict flight fares going forward and recommend you to buy it today or wait for it to get cheaper.

It also offer the ability to fine tune your search and when you click on the flight will take you directly to the address where you can buy the fare from the vendor.

I must admit, I don’t live in the USA but from what I can see, the features seems comprehensive and I would certainly use it if I were to travel within the USA and hope Bing bring the same search engines to other countries.

Research the location

Got an address of your hotel? If you do, there are a whole lot that you can do today before you leave home to find out about your destination. Firstly, Google Map can show you where the hotel is on the map, what the front gate looks like, what the surrounding environments are like, all highly useful information when you are staying at a brand new hotel, particularly ones that you are offered very cheap rate! For example, here is a satellite view and front gate view of the Versace hotel up in the Gold Coast in Australia.

Secondly, want to know if you can get a decent Pizza near your hotel? A quick search on Google map, once again reveals where to go for a late night feed when you get there!

Use forums for reviews

When you do come across various web sites about your destination or accommodations, chances are its filled with pretty pictures and descriptions of how exciting and wonderful the place, such is the nature of commercial contents, they WANT TO SELL YOU SOMETHING.

But If you are like me and are interested in finding out what real people who have visited the place really think about a place or hotel, online forums offers a fantastic venue where people often debate passionately about their favorite (or most hated!) destination. Google now offers you the ability to search within forum via advanced options or you can use any of the specialist forum search engines to dig through people’s experiences and discussions about a holiday destination.

What is going on today?

Whilst forums are great for finding past experience from people, Twitter search comes into its own when you need to find out the latest about a particular destinations. Latest discussions, sales or promotions, events, or even celebrity sightings! One of the coolest thing about search through twitter is the fact that you never know what you are going to find, so it’s always worth checking out the twitterspehere about your destination!

There you have it, the time you spend on researching and planning for your trip is definitely worth it, as you can leave the thinking at home!

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How To Search Twitter Effectively

Felix — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:23:00 +0000

Extending from my previous post on What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?, I want to now discuss how to search Twitter effectively beyond just using basic keywords.

Just like Google’s search, Twitter offers advanced search functionalities that can really help you find what you are looking for and filter out all the trash. Also, due to the real-time and conversational nature of twitter, there are some unique search operators you need to be aware of in order to search twitter effectively.

Firstly, to get a feel of all the advanced search functionalities, you should head over to the Twitter Advanced Search page where you can literally see all of the different ways you can search through people’s tweets. Just to help you get started, Twitter even provide an example page on how these advanced search operators can be used! By in large, the concepts are quite similar to the standard Google web search, but here are a few things unique to Twitter search and that you should pay close attention to when searching Twitter.

BE GENEROUS WITH THE EXCLUSION OPERATOR

It is highly likely that your first search attempt on twitter will be frustrating as the results are littered with useless rubbish. This is why the minus or exclusion operator should be your best friend in any Twitter Search. Be adventurous and generous and add more minus operator as you search to help you narrow down to a particular area by excluding areas you are not interested in. Sometimes it takes several attempt to really zero in on the area you are interested. This is particularly true when there is a viral topic going around that you are not particularly interested in and every second tweet has the keyword with the viral topic, in this case, simply use the “-“ operator to zap away these tweets.

DATE SENSITIIVE

Another great way to zero in on your search is to limit the date range using the “until” or “since” operator. If you know are only interested in people’s reaction about a particular topic from a particular date then limit tweets produced between the date ranges you are interested in. For example, if you want to find out about people’s expression and comments around Michael Jackson’s death, you would use “Michael Jackson since:2009-06-25” since he died on June 25 2009.

FROM THE RIGHT AUTHOR

Whilst you can search for mentions of persons by including his or her name in the search strings. You can also search through tweets from a particular person by using the “from” operator. This is useful when you want to search through a tweets of a person or accounts that you know provide useful, relevant or trustworthy information.

Together with the “to” operator, it allows you to search for specific tweets sent from a particular person to a particular person, very useful for backtracking and following conversations effectively.

For example, here is a search for all the tweets directed towards Demi Moore and are all the tweets produced by Ashton Kutcher. Adding additional keywords in the search will hopefully produce some interesting results!

HASHTAG

The use of hastag has caught on as an unofficial way of tagging a particular conversation. Hashtags.org lists popular and hot tags that you might want to include in your search string.

Most major events these days also tend to have an agreed hashtag that everyone use when they comment or joining on the conversation, once you know the hastag, including it will often dramatically increase the relevancy of your search results. For example the tag “#inauguration” was used as people were discussing and commenting on Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration back in Jan 2009.

Do you have any other tips? What’s your killer twitter search trick?

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