From the category archives:

Founder's Notes

Why 3 Search Engines in 1?

January 4, 2010

FunnelScope’s application is essentially three search engines in one: vertical search (travel), semantic search, and social search.

Why take this approach? FunnelScope’s thesis is this is the sweet spot for search.
Vertical search provides focus and comprehensiveness. We have all used vertical search engines. Sites like Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak, and TripAdvisor are all vertical search engines for [...]

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My Social Search Results

December 29, 2009

I want to thank everyone who provided their input for my recent social search. I thought that I would share my results.
Last week I did a search request on Twitter where I tweeted: “Looking for a hotel in san francisco for business and with decent rooms @funnelscope”. FunnelScope sent me results ranked by my criteria [...]

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FunnelScope’s Illustration of Personalized Search Results

December 21, 2009

One of the unique and compelling aspects of FunnelScope is the ability to get personalized hotel rankings based on input from your social network. Our features are still nascent but I thought I would show some examples of how FunnelScope’s personalization engine works.
We welcome any feedback on how we can improve this process. Please leave  [...]

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Social Search Kills Google?

December 14, 2009

There have been a number of blogs related to issues with Google search and the ease that their results can be spammed.  Fred Wilson wrote an interesting post on his blog today called Why Social Beats Search. In the last paragraph of his post, he states:
The Internet is a massive content creation machine. We are [...]

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Improving a User’s Actual Hotel Experience Begins Online

August 27, 2009

In my last post I compared online consumers to stock investors, where uncertainty adds a risk premium that decreases the price at which buyers are willing to pay. In this post, I would like to discuss specific examples for booking hotels online.
In Funnelscope’s analysis of tens of thousands of consumer reviews and ratings,  one of [...]

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Room Quality is 13% More Important Than Cleanliness According to Reviewers…

August 27, 2009

FunnelScope recently did a study on a large sample of reviews for hotels across several cities. Using our proprietary Natural Language Processing engine, we wanted to figure out what percent of reviews referenced each critical attribute. In other words, create a measurement of what reviewers cared about most often when it came to determining whether [...]

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Importance of Data in Mitigating Uncertainty for Online Local / Travel Search Consumers

August 27, 2009

As FunnelScope’s founder, I will use this blog to share my thoughts about FunnelScope and the problems we address. First, it may help to have a little background on me. I started out on Wall Street and left to be an entrepreneur. After several years trading complex derivatives, I realized my passion was building companies [...]

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