Google's 'Hotel Finder' Preps for Travel Push

Google has launched "Hotel Finder," what the company is calling an "experiment" in finding the perfect hotel.

Users can enter a location, a check-in (and check-out) date, as well as specify the hotel by price and hotel class and rating.

Google also offers some novel tweaks, including the ability to search via a "shape," where users can outline the boundary range of the search area. In that regard, the new Google Hotel Finder looks quite similar to Yahoo's Sketch-A-Search, a technology that the company rolled out in 2010.

In some sense, Hotel Finder is a twist on Google's established Google Places, and perhaps a framework or complement for its ITA travel integration. And it's not even a beta, but an "experiment".

Google announced plans to buy ITA for $700 million in July 2010. The Boston-based software company specializes in organizing airline data like flight times, availability, and prices. Google said last year that the purchase will help Google produce new flight search tools intended to simplify the process of searching for flights, comparing options, and buying tickets. That acquisition was recently approved by the Justice Department.

In reality, though, Hotel Finder seems to be a novel way to promote Google's AdWords. After defining and reading the reviews that others have posted for hotels, users can click a drop-down "Book" menu, with listings from Travelocity, Expedia, and others. Each price, though, is listed as an ad - although, put another way, other referral sites most likely offer a percentage of revenue for the referral as well.

PCMag.com has rounded up the best travel sites. With Hotel Finder, I'd cross-check Google's findings against TripAdvisor, whose candid, crowd-sourced reviews greatly outweigh the reach of what Google's own reviewers have added.