I need to go to Cornwall for a few days – work as opposed to play, I’m afraid, so I got our travel company to look at booking a room in Truro. Obviously they have some sort of search engine that returns the best hotels in Truro for a given price range, so the results they got back were:
BEST WESTERN GLENGARRY HOTEL
150 Willow Street
Rate – 121.00
HOTEL DESCRIPTION
IN THE HUB OF NOVA SCOTIA, THE BEST WESTERN GLENGARRY HOTEL, OFFERS OUR GUESTS AN AIR CONDITIONED FULLY LICENSED DINING ROOM, COFFEE SHOP, AND PIANO BAR
The Royal Hotel
Truro
Rate – 115.00 B&B Continental breakfast
Non refundable rate once booked.
COMFORT INN TRURO
12 Meadow Dr
Rate – 108.00 B&B Continental breakfast
HOTEL DESCRIPTION
Close to Tidal Bore. Easy access off Hwy 102. Shopping and restaurants nearby
Now I’m sure the Best Western Glengarry and The Comfort Inn are both find hotels in their own right, bit the commute to the office I’m working in would be a bit of a pig.
Search engines are great tools to have, but don’t just blindly trust the results.
I can’t remember what site it was now, but when I was researching a trip to Antwerp, the site didn’t return the Antwerp that is a regional Belgium capital, one of the world centres of the diamond trade, a centre for art and architecture, and a major European tourist destination, but some tiny village in upstate New York.
I’m sure that the upstate NY village had a lot going for it, not that you or me are likely to give a toss.
I’m sure search engines are going to get their act together on things like this. I noticed in the last few weeks that google.com diverts to google.co.uk automatically, assuming that I’m in the UK due to my IP address. Same on a customer site who has their HO in the Netherlands, I got the Google Netherlands site by default but with the option to switch to the .com version.
Apply that to maps and so on and maybe we’d be getting somewhere. Apply that to address forms that pick out your country for you, without forcing you to choose from a pick list with “USA” as the first entry, followed by “Afghanistan”, “Angola” yada yada, with us in the UK wondering if this form recognises “Great Britain”, “United Kingdom” or “England”.