Travel on the Web - SERPS

I actually started this blog to talk about travel. Hotel and tourism marketing web sites is what I am all about. So let's start with the results that the browser gets if they try to get information on a hotel in London on Google

Of the 1st 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 1 is a hotel, and one is a hotel school
Of the 2nd 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 2 are hotels
Of the 3rd 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 2 are hotels
Of the 4th 10 results 8 are mainly spam, 2 are hotels
Of the 5th 10 results 5 are mainly spam, 5 are hotels

Result for any poor user is that they find it virtually impossible to find a hotel, and are forced into wending their way through bucket shops, that are offering in the end the same product.

In other words there are only 4 or 5 big wholesalers offering booking facilities, and everyone else is a sub agent of these 4 or 5. Many of the sub agents have nothing to offer the user, other than a position in the Search Engine results page.

End of the day frustrated punter.

My point comes into even sharper relief if you try to find say "London Airport Parking" . Now there are only about 5 sites offering parking in and around Heathrow Airport London, but hundreds of sites are offering information on then. They are all affiliates of the 5 physical car parks, but the browser has no idea of that and gets frustrated as they try to find somewhere to park their car

So Search Engines, what is the answer, do you slam all the feeder sites. How can you possibly have a machine algo that will separate the good from the bad. Right now Google puts a load of old rubbish on its results pages if one looks for a hotel. The links mainly lead to bad sites, who spam links and anything else to get search engine positioning. Rarely are these sites of use to the user. Somebody needs to do a hand sorting job in spam areas like "hotels" if the user is to get any real use from that search engine.

The cynic might feel that the search engine's only role in life is to make money, and stuff the user. In which case we will continue to get bad results...until another company comes up with a better business model