TripAdvisor IPO | Hacker News Reader

TripAdvisor IPO

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25 pointssanj10 comments

The complete lack of coverage in the tech press (techcrunch, et al) certainly demonstrates their west coast myopia.

I work at TripAdvisor and we continue to work hard to hire and delight engineers. Drop me a line if you want to join us.

I use tripadvisor all the time, content wise it is excellent. The user interface really needs a major overhaul though, it isn't nearly as easy to use as it could be. (No complaints about the ads.)

Two sites in your general industry that have nice usability are oyster.com and redtag.ca

Oyster.com content wise and usability blows everything else out of the water, it makes every other hotel/resort information website look like it was developed in 1990, which in most cases I think might actually be the case.

redtag.ca search engine is head and shoulders above expedia, travelocity, or any other of the big names I've used. I literally can't get expedia to work. But then, for hotel information, links go through to the archaic websites of the vacation package provider.

Take all of tripadvisors massive user generated content, put a good search engine on top of it, curate your content (photos especially, to try and get something half as good as oyster) and you would have a powerful platform. It's a shame to see such amazing content not properly exploited.

FYI - your email address in not (visible) in your profile.

It is just [my-HN-handle]@tripadvisor.com.

Here's a news article: http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1376-LV...

EXPE 27.89 +1.04 3.87% TRIP 27.67 -2.58 -8.53%

Is there a reason for all of the web company IPO's lately? Is it a decrease in regulation perhaps?

This is a spinoff from EXPE, so it can't easily be compared to other recent IPOs that are more greenfield development-ish. So if there is a trend, I wouldn't use this as a data point.

TRIP is 11 years old.

The golden age of SEO is over but the good news is we're now living in the golden age of social media distribution. The success of Zynga and Groupon demonstrates that this is an even more potent engine for growth.

And this would be why TripAdvisor has been working on a rich, meaningful and useful social integration. We have been a launch partner on most of Facebook's successive new initiatives.

Full disclosure: I led that engineering team!

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