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I fully expect that it wasn't their decision, but also presume that they'd have insight into why a decision like that would be made. Also, it allows me to expr
by _boffin_ 5y ago
I fully expect that it wasn't their decision, but also presume that they'd have insight into why a decision like that would be made.
Also, it allows me to express my disdain at such a decision and if enough other people did too, said engineer has the ability to go up the flagpole and inform the decision makers that there are many people who are displeased at their decision.
- brianwawok 5y agoTo make more money. Like most "dark" patterns.
- dageshi 5y agoJust a thought, perhaps it's something to prevent scraping.
- rockostrich 5y agoThis actually is one of the benefits of being a mobile only product! It makes it a lot harder to scrape the data that we produce (prediction and such). I don't think that's ever been the main reason though, just a side benefit.
- rockostrich 5y agoI do have that ability, but I also have the sense to know that HN readers is not who we're building the product for and when you look at the travel industry as a whole the SEO/web advertising game is not one you really want to play. Two of the biggest spenders on Google AdWords are Expedia and Booking.com. They spend our annual marketing budget in every like 10 minutes or something like that. We literally can't compete, especially when you consider that Google is doing their own with Google flights and hotel search which favors themselves. So the smart thing to do (at least in our opinion) was to not even play the search engine advertising game and focus on building mobile apps that users will come back to after using. We tend to see really high retention rates with users because they like the experience and we don't have to pay for the ad impression every time they feel like searching for travel destinations.