Google Introduces Hotel Search

Couple things that impressed me ...

- Results are returned instantly. - The heat map idea, coupled with draggable area, is pretty cool.

Nice to see more competition and innovation in hotel search.

Gorgeous. If only they could do the same for apartment/house rentals!

Really, that would be perfect.

This is the reason why I'm long on GOOG. There's a huge world of revenue out there, and they just have to reach out and grab it.

I'm just connecting fictitious dots here, but it seems a rather crafty move to launch a hotel search site in the midst of the Airbnb debacle. "Oh, I was going to use Airbnb, then I heard about so-and-so's experience with them and decided to book a hotel instead ... and oh look! A spiffy new hotel search service!"

Which reminds me--I think there was an article linked here on HN not long ago about Google's timing in releasing new products/features--can't find it now, but makes me wonder if Google doesn't keep a few projects in the wings, waiting for the opportune moment (i.e. best PR moment) to launch them.

There's good potential here for accurate price discrimination. If Google collects and passes on user data (especially now that there's G+), they'll know a banker can probably pay more for a hotel than a student.

I'm not sure if they'll put this into practice, but this sure gives them the ability to.

(Not even a "beta" tagline, an "experiment".)

My go-to place for hotels is TripAdvisor. This doesn't seem to have an real improvements.