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I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online
by legohead 5y ago
I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things, but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research done in order to get those clicks/adwords.
For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple enough. Circus Circus actually has a waterslide, but if you dive deeper (read a hundred reviews manually) you find out parts are often shut down, and the hotel itself is quite trashy and smells bad and has bad service (explains the really cheap room rate). But do you find that information on blogs? No way, they just include all the hotels with pools and copy in the verbiage directly from the hotel websites or other blogs.
There's probably an actual traveler blog out there that tells you all this and has great information, but it's hidden by all the SEO optimized trash blogs.
And this example can be applied to so many things we do all the time. Try to find a product you want on Amazon without spending half a day sorting through reviews and trash blogs.
So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. I'd pay a few bucks to call up a service to answer these questions definitively for me.
- trh0awayman 5y agoThere used to be a search engine in the mid 2000s that was just like this. It was called ChaCha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)
- smlacy 5y agoSee also Aardvark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) Acquired by Google in 2010 and ...
- pooper 5y agoFifty million dollars would change my life. I would take a guaranteed fifty million dollars payout over one in ten chance to get a billion dollars. What are the chances that I cumbents will stand by idly as the "next Google" just takes over? Best case I can think of is the incumbent imitates the upstart and becomes better.
- buttersbrian 5y agoYep. That was the idea. 'voice assistants' came along, smart phones took off, and cell speeds became fast enough to make ChaCha untenable. Source: worked at ChaCha.
- sizzle 5y agoWow where did you go after! AskJeeves?
- anticristi 5y agoWhen I visited my mom in Romania, I was amazed that hair dressers filled *exactly this purpose*. It almost felt like you were "Googling" for 30 minutes and getting a haircut as a side-effect. Customer: How is the newly opened Spa? Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold.
- zie 5y agoNot limited to Romania. Librarians are also pretty fabulous for local information and free.
- ricktdotorg 5y agothis is so true! when i first moved to the USA, a librarian in austin texas was so incredibly helpful to me in sorting out/understanding the "i've just moved to the USA" process. i knew not even a handful of people and she was so selfless and generous in her efforts to help me navigate pre-web then-INS and TX state bureaucracy as a 0day new person here.
- adventured 5y agoI agree with everything you said about the spam blog problem. And yet Travelocity (and others) would have told you how terrible Circus Circus is in five minutes or less. 22,000 reviews, 3.2 stars out of 5, among the worst in Vegas (among major hotels) with a gigantic number of reviews. Its room rate alone helps you to begin immediately forming a good conclusion about its quality. This isn't a subtle thing. Oh, but that's not realiable, one might say. Yes it is. It does a great job of approximating the quality of the hotel in question, and it's an exceptionally easy and fast means to narrow with. It isn't a perfect approach (is it really a 3.1 or 3.3 star quality?!?) and doesn't need to be, it just needs to let you know that Circus Circus is garbage, and it does exactly that.
- chrisshroba 5y agoI find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for: - good coffeeshops - tacos - Korean grocery stores - places that have traditional style al pastor tacos - finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store - finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe) - hot chicken - canolis and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info.
- dx034 5y agoAnd reddit works because it's not an algorithm that decides which post is good, it's people with upvotes. And that in turn can be used by search engines. Maybe that's what would fix Google. Up&down-votes for web results. Would probably be the easiest way to penalize bad sites and promote good niche pages. But after they removed downvoting in Youtube, I wouldn't get my hopes up.
- ggpsv 5y agoThis tends to work for me as well but signal vs noise ratio has worsened over time. Despite Reddit's questionable decisions in the past years it still has useful information for all sorts of things. Reddit's own search has become less reliable so I search via DDG like `<query> 'site:reddit.com'`, falling back to `!g <query> 'site:reddit.com'` if the former doesn't get me anywhere.
- airstrike 5y ago> Reddit's own search has become less reliable Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile of shit
- wormer 5y agoYea I always just put in the question I want into DDG and then just add reddit in the end. It's so much better than any blog or anything because at least it gives the semblance of real users giving their opinion.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago"best x in vegas" + reddit Duh.
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoThis maybe works for Vegas, but what about places without a large demographic on reddit, or where the locals wouldn't be writing about these things in a language you speak?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ip26 5y agoIsn’t that called a travel agent?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago> So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. I love the idea. However… You have invented an influencer hellscape. Not to mention the complete subjectiveness of so many things.
- hackernewds 5y agoImagine all these humans will be paid / corrupted by the destinations if they hold outsize influence
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- telchior 5y agoA paper was posted here a few days ago about how to use individual tasks on crowdsourcing marketplaces to put together articles on complex topics: https://joe.cat/images/papers/knowledge-accelorator.pdf https://joe.cat/images/papers/knowledge-accelorator.pdf I can imagine the first two steps of their process working for a human-assisted search machine. Specifically, the "finding sources of information" and "filtering information" steps. But, I'd imagine the human workers would still need more complex / configurable search tools than Google (which is probably what the workers in the study used to find their sources).
- hackernewds 5y agoAmex has a really good concierge that handles this. And it's free with most cards. Absolutely underrated, especially when you're traveling internationally
- KerryJones 5y agoExact same experience except with Iceland. Google "top attractions in Iceland" and you get a bunch of garbage posts telling you about the Blue Lagoon. I ended up reading an entire book on iceland tourism and perusing many blogs and reaching out to many friends, and the Blue Lagoon is definitely not one of the top spots.
- amelius 5y agoThe future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix of trust to retrieve review scores, etc. Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the reviews from other HN users ...
- rubyist5eva 5y ago> So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. So...a travel agent? Nothing beats talking to a person one on one who is actually trained to do this stuff and personalize it to their client. We've come full circle.
- SahAssar 5y ago> For example: best hotel pool in vegas. I get what you're saying but, does anyone really need the "best" here? why not "good" or "great"?
- wodenokoto 5y agoYou get the same crap results with those searches. All review site have become some version of "link to amazon and include their description as your in detail review"
- makeitdouble 5y ago> call up someone and ask for some simple advice > best hotel pool in vegas. How is finding the best X at something from I assume hundreds if not thousands of choices, a simple question ? In particular, would asking any human give you the actual answer ? At best we’d be in the same situation as looking at guide books or Michelin guide kind of rankings, created with human oversight but static in nature. More probably we’d get the most reputable hotel with no actual evaluation if it is effectively better than the myriads of others. And that’s without digging into what you value in pool experiences vs what any evaluation system took as criteria to rank them. I think this is an example of how we are trying very hard to simplify problems that are inherently complex. And sometimes it kinda seem to work, so people start forgetting it still is complex and rebuilding it from scratch means reapplying magic on it again.
- jthrowsitaway 5y agoIf you don't mind staying on Fremont Street (I prefer it to the Strip), the Golden Nugget has a pretty nice pool setup (complete with waterslide) and is a "nice" place to stay.
- Tmpod 5y agoHave you given WikiVoyage a shot? It has been quite helpful in some occasions. See [1] for Vegas, for example. [1]: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Las_Vegas https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Las_Vegas
- ALittleLight 5y agoHow could it possibly be only a few bucks to answer questions like this though? A human would have to be doing the research and writing for you. If that human is trying to answer a query a minute to earn a reasonable wage then your results are going to be rushed and poor. If the human takes enough time to find a good answer then the search will need to cost enough to make it worth the time of a skilled researcher. I could see a "virtual assistant" version of this where you pay fifty dollars and send a request like "Reservations in Vegas for these dates at a hotel with good pool."
- chrismcb 5y agoFeels like you asked the wrong question. You asked about the best pool, not the best hotel with a good pool. But even do, I've read many sites that tell a little bit the hotel when I search for the best pool. Not one of them listed circus circus
- prawn 5y agoNot sure if it's changed, but Oyster was historically known for really detailed Vegas hotel reviews. They'd surely have a list of best hotel pools. https://www.oyster.com/las-vegas/hotels/ https://www.oyster.com/las-vegas/hotels/ You can also get some decent mileage out of Booking.com and checking reviews for keywords. That won't help you quickly find the best hotel pool, but it will help you find out what people think of a specific hotel's pool (e.g., Circus Circus).
- bogomipz 5y agoI can empathize exactly. Trying to do a bit of research on an upcoming trip seems like something that should be fun or at least not feel like an overly burdensome exercise. But as you point out it's a giant time drain filled with frustration. Everything from the booking sites that create a high pressure experience("3 people are looking at this room right now!") to the influencer chum pages that seem to be more about marketing their brand than providing practical information. You can lose two hours trying to research a trip and still not got anywhere. A service where you could talk to local people would be great. That's a service would be worth paying for, like a travel advisor.