Fun With VRBO Searches
I don’t know how many times friends have told me lately that they have a hard time finding properties on VRBO, or, rather, they have a hard time narrowing down the possibilities. VRBO has a large number of properties in most of the popular vacation spots (in the US, at least), and finding that 3 bedroom with a king size bed, bunk beds for the kids, and a pool in Destin can be frustrating to do when you’re just working off the index page. I’m not the only one, people definitely get frustrated trying to narrow down their searches.
In fact, it’s really easy to do this. VRBO is entirely driven by an internal search engine and does surface most of the full power of search through the search box at the top of most pages. The problem is, VRBO does a lousy job of making the advanced search features obvious. There are some enticing starting points; VRBO has links buried on the home page for things like Pet friendly vacation rentals, Handicapped accessible vacation rentals, Kid friendly vacation rentals, Vacation rentals near golf courses, etc, and you can use the drill-down navigation at the top of the search page to narrow your search by region, but that still doesn’t help find your 3 bedroom with the appropriate bedding and a pool.
So let’s break down that query above. The first part is obvious, “Destin” works to get us to Destin, FL. You might just go throw “3br king bunk pool” into the search box, but that’s going to give you a surprising result. What’s happening is that “king” is hitting on a region and with VRBO search, regions always get filtered first. So the magic sauce here is “king bed bunk bed pool” and there you have it. Of course, I mentioned kids and it might be good to further refine your search to “kid friendly”, so the full deal is destin 3br king bed bunk bed pool kid friendly. At this point, you still have 2 pages of results; plenty to choose from, but nowhere near the full spectrum of properties in Destin to hunt through.
Of course, it’s not always obvious what magic words will work. For bedrooms _x_br will always work, and the biggies, “pool”, “beach”, “beachfront”, “internet”, and “cable” all work. The tricky part is with things like beds: you might just type in “king” or “bunk” and expect that to hit on a bed type; it turns out that these either hit on a geographic region or a freeform text search. In the case of beds, “king bed”, “queen bed”, and “bunk bed” all work.
The point is, there’s a lot of properties on VRBO. If you’re having trouble finding the perfect vacation property, use that search box. It makes life a lot easier.
— Gordon Weakliem
I started using Flipboard a couple weeks ago. I might as well rephrase that. I pretty much stopped using Google Reader a few weeks ago.
Newsreaders had turned into a grind for me. Every time I logged in, I’d see this endless backlog of unread articles, along with the triple digit unread count. All the theory about the river of news style presentation was turning into reality for me. In spite of its shortcomings, what a physical newspaper doesn’t give me is a count of unread articles in the current paper. After using importing my Google Reader subscriptions into Flipboard, I realized what the advantage is: I really don’t care. If I miss an article, no big deal. It’s better than the alternative where the pressure to get my unread count to zero lead me to skim all my subscriptions so quickly I absorbed almost nothing.
It’s not like Flipboard is that revolutionary. River of News has been around for years. Newspaper style layouts (technically, Flipboard is magazine style) have been around nearly as long; pretty much every major newsreader offers one. I think the tablet makes it more appealing in its way, but there definitely is something that makes Flipboard more than the sum of its parts.
There are a few things with Flipboard that are going to change how publishers do things if the whole style takes off. For a start, an image makes your article stand out much more, since it’ll get prime treatment. Second, it’s not clear how Flipboard chooses to select text for a teaser – sometimes a 500 word article will get only the title. It would seem that, in spite of my most fervent wishes, publishers of partial-text feeds do better because Flipboard will simply grab the teaser and go with that, rather than trying to come up with its own.
— Gordon Weakliem
It's Apple vs. Amazon
Jon Gruber nailed it with his commentary on the Kindle Fire:
bq.It’s all about the content, though. That’s the difference that other tablet makers missed… they seem to be chasing the iPad on specs, … But they have no clear message telling people what you can do with them.
That’s the difference I see people missing all the time. They’re chattering about how Google might benefit, how this strengthens the Android platform. They’re missing the point. Apple and Amazon are increasingly in the content business, bringing a real stream of cash off of content, and particularly for Amazon, the hardware is just a necessary tool. They care about it the same way retailers care about their store – because a good customer experience is critical if you want customers to spend money. But in the end, what they want is for you to use their device to spend money. People were misled thinking that Amazon was taking on the booksellers. Borders was just collateral damage.
Read the rest of Gruber’s piece.
— Gordon Weakliem
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Via DF Hewlett-Packard Board Meets on Replacing CEO
Herb Greenberg informs us that “[Apotheker] will get a total of at least $9.4 million, including his relocation and signing bonuses.” Pretty good for a year’s work, if you call this work.
Meg Whitman? Seriously? Why not just take HP into chapter 7 and get it over with?
What amazes me is why HP shareholders put up with their board. At this point it’s pretty clear that HP’s problems start with their board. Here’s a company that Carl Icahn could legitimately go after and talk about increasing shareholder value, and actually have a chance to do something about it.
— Gordon Weakliem
Kill the iPod Touch?
I was considering the other day whether I should get my daughter an iPod Touch. Looking at the features and reviews, it occurred to me… isn’t this just an iPhone without the phone? Today, Jon Gruber’s thinking the same thing.
If, as Vintagezen suggested, you could stick a SIM card in and turn it into a phone, especially a pay-per-minute phone, that’d really be perfect. If one could buy a TracFone SIM and recharge minutes in the usual way, that would take care of everything in one package. Except that it’d cost a bit more. :/
— Gordon Weakliem
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