A Win - Win Game!!!

Huh, my first month here at Iteamic has been a eventful one. There have been a lot of things that we are strategizing on currently.

It seems that last week has also been interesting for indian Online travel portals [OTP's] as well. According to the latest buzz - Cleartrip.com claims To have Clocked 480,000 Transactions And $100 Million In Sales In Year One. According to this interview on EyeforTravel.

Not to be left far behind is Yatra.com who claim that they are well positioned and have pushed Travelguru down to position 3 and are currently topping $5 Million a month.Most of the Online Travel Portals [OTP's] are silently whistling their way to the banks.

They are happy and are confident about their respective vertical search capabilities and are consiously looking forward to more improvements through technology.

This made me want to know more on the technologies used by these so called Vertical Search Engines for the travel domains. I explored some of them and have decided that I shall continually track these developments.

With Web2.0 and user-intutive interfaces the mantra of the day each click matters - vertical search engines like Kayak have their technology roots with Ajax served up by Apache, Tomcat, Java 5, with Perl, Groovy and Ruby operational glue, all running on Linux and developed (mostly) on Mac OS X Tiger and Ubuntu Linux. They use MySQL when we need to do databasy things. They also use memcached to keep the database from getting crushed.

Like how I had discussed earlier here - In major verticals like travel, specialized search engines might take a big bite out of the traditional search engines' market share - including Google's advertising pie. This article gives us an insight on how Vertical Searche Engines are gathering their momentum.

I would have to rush into a meeting now - the developments would be keenly followed by me and you can check for further updates in a weeks time :-)