Try the destination research tool
The destination research tool is a quick little structured metasearch for looking up information on destinations in a really fast way. Just try it by typing in a destination above. It should be pretty self-explainatory, but it’s just a conceptual prototype/mashup now, so I’ll explain the intentions. I could even need some help to make it better.
There are three elements to this:
First, it gives essential links, which is intended to be a list with direct searches into large and useful databases of destination information. I’ve got Wikipedia, Lonely Planets Thorn Tree and a couple more now to show what sort of sources I’m thinking of, but the intention is that this list should be amended somewhat extensively. Does people agree that this is a useful tool? For me it’s just about remembering every site that might have useful information AND avoiding to type in the name every time. No big service there - but I intend to add a little tool that checks if there actually is relevant information available. I could use the Google interface I’m using elsewhere for this, but I’m not sure how happy they would be with a hundred requests to their servers per search here.
Now I could need some help to get some good sources here - please add them in the comment section if you have any.
Secondly, I have the Featured Travel Search. This is an exceptionally cool service from Google called a Custom Search Engine, and it is just exactly that - a custom search engine. This searches only sources I’ve set up in advance - and here I’ve set it up to use news sources and magazines that provide quality feature material on travel and destinations. So far I haven’t added that many. The active sources right now are:
- New York Times Travel section
- The Independent Travel section
- The Guardian Travel section
- National Geographic
- Matador Travel
- CNN Travel section
- Los Angeles Times Travel Section
As you can see, this differs from the first by being editorial news sources rather than information databases. Here I am really keen on good suggestions. Got a favorite travel magazine with a good web presence? Please add it in the comment section and I’ll add it to the search. But: The intention is to use very good sources - normal blogs come in the next section:
Google search: The last part is a search across the databases from google that may contain destination relevant information. I’ve included web search, blogs, images and books. The book search really impresses me - even with the most obscure destinations it usually manages to come up with something interesting, and often even has a picture of the cover. I don’t really need much help with this part, it’s just Google Search. But all suggestions are welcome.
Now another cool thing with this is the Google Ajax API, which makes everything show up dynamically. That means I can mention a location in a post, and link it directly to the search - but the original post will still be active in the background and retrievable by a simple click on Close All. So I can mention Easter Island and all sorts of information will be really readily available with a simple click.
So is this neat or what? I have a lot more ideas for this, but I’ll most likely stick to just adding more sources for now, and hopefully writing some more normal posts.
Feedback on this is very welcome! And - if anyone is using Internet Explorer, I would like to hear if it works ok. Also, send a friend here to test it - I don’t like to ask you dear readers to bother your friends, but it would be nice to get the little search engine tested properly by different users. I can imagine there is a fair amount of things I haven’t thought of..
And so on! Good luck planning your next adventures.
