You can log-in on the Uptake homepage using your Facebook credentials to access Uptake’s new Travel Q&A feature in beta and get recommendations from your Facebook friends about destinations on your bucket list.

But Uptake believes its solution is superior to those of other social travel sites, such as Gogobot, because Uptake’s search technology goes beyond analyzing structured data (i.e. check-ins and places people have lived) and retrieves unstructured data (status updates, photo tags and comments) from Facebook.

“It is interesting and a good place to start,” says Yen Lee, Uptake co-founder and President, of Gogobot’s allegedly more limited approach, “but how many places have you lived and how many places have you checked-in?”

Travis Katz, Gogobot co-founder and CEO, didn’t react to Uptake’s claims about the nature of Gogobot’s data, but said: “There are lots of companies these days who are trying to imitate what we are doing at Gogobot. We wish them well.”

Uptake says of its new Travel Q&A feature:

This new service analyzes both friends’ explicit location data, such as hometowns and check-ins, as well as friends’ less-obvious, implicit location data, which contains nearly 70% of friends’ destinations in the form of photos, status updates and comments.

Lee claims that Uptake, using natural language search and by “structuring the unstructured data on Facebook,”  usually knows of more than 1,000 destinations that each Facebook user’s friends have been and therefore can better determine who the Uptake user should ask for travel recommendations.

Uptake has two other major differentiators when it comes to social travel, Lee argues. Uptake’s 3 million unique users in October made it the third largest trip-planning site, behind TripAdvisor and Yahoo Travel, and Uptake offers the “most comprehensive library” of activities when users are trying to get more information about their friends’ recommendations, he adds.

Uptake says it has categorized 1.8 million “destination ideas, hotels, restaurants, activities and attractions.”

Along the way the team take in the sights before hooking up the recently acquired Everytrail, take a walk through Palo Alto, before hooking up with Uptake‘s Yen Lee.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB_A8rNofeA

Meanwhile, a trip to California wouldn’t be complete without leaving a mark on one of its Pacific beaches…

NB: Other episodes.

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four

The search giant announced – in a widely expected blog post – last week that it was making “big algorithmic improvements” to its ranking system, effectively punishing sites known unfavourably by many as content farms – in other words: those lacking a whole lot of original material.

Google says it wants to provide better rankings for “high quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.

Sensibly, Google has steered clear of naming and shaming sites it expected to be hit by such a change in its search algorithm (only in the US so far) – leaving it to the system to calculate and others to work it out.

Search company Sistrix worked on one million keywords before and after the update, ranking them by a search visibility index covering the number of keyword positions lost.

Search Engine Land asked Sistrix to provide details of a further 100 domains that suffered losses. The data is arranged by total number of keyword positions lost and the percentage lost.

With AssociatedContent.com topping the list (162,917 positions lost, around 75%), the travel brands featured include:

• Trails – 29,835 positions lost, around 78%
• Travelpod – 28,513, 68%
• Uptake – 19,655, 58%
• MyTravelGuide – 13,340, 69%
• Destination360 – 11,167, 76%
• Travelpost – 9,412, 75%

Clearly any site with such dramatic reductions in page rank will be searching around for some quick answers – and a change in strategy given that Google is seemingly cracking down in quite a dramatic way.

Some, however, may well see themselves as simply victims of their own service – such as those that aggregate reviews from around the web into a single platform, such as Uptake.

Either way, Google’s crackdown will no doubt be welcomed by those that have worked to build a presence in search based on original content or exclusive user generated content.

However, general manager and founder at TripAdvisor-owned Travelpod, Luc Lévesque, says he is surprised to have been on the receiving end of such a “drastic update”. He adds:

“TravelPod has millions of great travel stories, photos and videos collected since 1997 from our travel bloggers. Over the past few years, thanks to site improvements and an overall redesign our membership and content has been growing faster than ever before, and we are still getting millions of visitors per month.

“I can’t see how this benefits Google’s users to send less traffic to sites with as much rich & unique content as we have.   I can only assume it is a mistake, and that future tweaks to their algorithm will correct for it.”

Travelpost declined to discuss the matter.

Uptake CEO Yen Lee says the company has no plans to change its strategy, but admits Google’s move has hit the site. He says:

“Not sure what their methodology was, but no changes expected in our strategy. Farmer has had an impact but we more than doubling in size y/y as we have diversified our consumer channels and improved our product quality.”

The new-hires are Lesley Kao as vice president of product and Chris Hickson as vice president of revenue. Kao most recently was senior director of product management and product marketing for Yahoo’s listings businesses. And, Hickson most recently was vice president of business development at Boku, a mobile payments site, and previously served as general manager of Yahoo Travel.

UpTake also brought in Russ Fradin, a former executive vice president at comScore who later ran business development at FlyCast and Wine.com, as an independent board member.

With the personnel changes, Yen Lee, UpTake co-founder and president, will leave some of the day to day operations of the business, such as consumer acquisition and monetization, up to Hickson, while Lee says he will focus on “deepening partnerships and strategic acquisitions.”

Lee, formerly general manager of travel at Yahoo, says UpTake is on track to be profitable by the Summer and wouldn’t have brought in senior talent such as Kao and Hickson unless the company would be in the black.

In November, UpTake acquired RealTravel, and Lee said UpTake would be vetting additional acquisitions “if I can find something that makes sense.”

Hinting at his acquisition aims, Lee says UpTake has no holdings outside North America, and no mobile or social sites.

UpTake has received some $14 million in funding to date from Shasta Ventures and Trinity Ventures.

Kao, who helped globalize Yahoo Answers, will handle UpTake’s further investments in the consumer experience, Lee says, hinting that there is much work to do.

“We want to simplify your experience,” Lee says. “We want to provide answers, not information. When you are asking where to stay in New York, you are not looking for a list of 30 hotels,” Lee says.

With Kao now in her post as vice president of product, UpTake co-founder Gene McKenna, who was vice president of product, will run search in the back end, Lee says.

Meanwhile, Fradin, UpTake’s newest board member, has focused on “turbo-charging how to scale a company” and “is great at starting and selling companies,” Lee says.

Might he be positioning UpTake for a sale?

“It never hurts to get one of the best at it,” Lee says. “He is world class at that.”

Both companies aggregate travel content about hotels and destinations, combine them with user generated content and offer travel recommendations to consumers.

“With the addition of RealTravel, UpTake Networks intends to accelerate their investment in the online travel research experience and drive more free, qualified leads back to travel sites,” UpTake stated.

Yen Lee, president of UpTake, says UpTake was looking for ways to accelerate its business through an acquisition and that RealTravel was an easy choice because of its complementary vision and similar technology.

While UpTake provides its social hotel and destination recommendations for properties and venues in the U.S. and Canada, RealTravel does so for hotels and destinations in 200 countries, Lee says.

UpTake plans to retain the RealTravel brand and its team of six, including CEO and founder Ken Leeder, have moved into UpTake’s office, bringing the staff roster up to 24, Lee says.

Lee says RealTravel was attractive for its reach, team, vision and brand.

“Truth be told, RealTravel has a much stronger brand than UpTake’s,” Lee says.

In other developments, UpTake relaunched its homepage this week.

Here’s the previous homepage.

And, here’s the new, redesigned homepage, with its “playlists” and scrollbar listing what UpTake says is 5,000 content partners:

Lee says the new homepage is geared to be more consumer friendly for travel planners who come to UpTake through “side doors” i.e. organic search.

“For consumers for which we have no context on their trip, this new homepage exposes our semantic approach in a much more consumer-friendly way,” Lee says.

About that semantic approach, UpTake says it “uses an ontology of travel-related terms and natural language analysis to extract over 40 million meta-tags” to return “unbiased, personal recommendations…”

Lee declines to detail UpTake’s economics, but says the company is growing 200% year over year and “cash is not an issue.”

Plans for 2011 included a renewed focus on the user experience, he adds.

Known as Travel Gems, UpTake’s system will feed relevant content from travel bloggers against search results using pingback technology developed by the company.

The programme will launch in conjunction with Travel Channel website World Hum as its first content provider.

UpTake president Yen Lee says the system will benefit users by giving them access to relevant editorial and also bloggers through exposure to a wider audience.

Blog content featured on the Gems site includes the post title, blog name, a thumbnail image and a excerpt from the blog, allowing UpTake visitors determine if they want to click through to the actual blog.

Although the system is being marketed as a consumer-driven initiative, clearly UpTake will benefit enormously from the SEO value of the pingback system it has created for use by bloggers.

Writers can automatically alert the UpTake engine to a relevant post on their blog by including a dedicated link.

A screening system will be used to prevent inappropriate content finding its way to search results on the main UpTake site.

Lee says:

“Through Travel Gems, UpTake merges two social media communities, travel review sites and blogging to improve the online trip planning experience.

“Travel Gems extends our mission of aggregating the most useful travel information to help consumers decide upon a better trip.”

Last week Lee savaged search sites Google and Bing in a blog post following their appearance at the PhoCusWright@ITB event in Berlin, Germany.

At the same time, Traxo, which launched in August and competes with TripIt, TripCase and Kayak Trips, among others, redesigned its website and took a veiled poke at category leader TripIt.

Part of the new homepage branding reads: “Don’t trip over your trip details,” a likely reference to Traxo’s view that TripIt is clunky, in part because TripIt users must manually forward reservations confirmations and updates to TripIt to upload them into their itineraries. In contrast, Traxo users furnish Traxo with their supplier site user names and passwords and Traxo scrapes the supplier websites for travelers’ new bookings and updates.

Here’s the new Traxo homepage:

The redesign, with its tagline, “Traxo, Your Home Base for Travel,” and the additional messaging, “Automatically organize, manage and share your travel plans” and “Don’t trip over your trip details,”  is an attempt to reposition Traxo as more than an itinerary management and sharing service — which is how Traxo wants consumers to view its competitor, TripIt. Instead, Traxo wants its users to view Traxo as a broader service-provider that also helps with trip-planning, accessing previous itineraries, posting trip photos, playing on social networks and other services.

Hence the content integration with UpTake, which probes several thousand websites to help consumers come up with inspiring places to go based on their preferences. So, after consumers book their flights to Dallas, alongside their flight confirmation details on Traxo, they’ll now see hotels, attractions and restaurants that UpTake recommends for their trip. Consumers will get snippets of Uptake recommendations in their Traxo trip details page and click over to UpTake for the full low-down.

The Uptake integration into the Traxo trip details page looks like this:

Meanwhile, I asked Gregg Brockway, TripIt’s president and co-founder, about Traxo’s apparent jab at TripIt with the “Don’t trip over your trip details” line.

Brockway’s response was succinct and graphical. He sent me the following link to Compete, showing TripIt traffic in green and Traxo’s in blue.

Here’s the chart:

Ng, a veteran of the technology-conference circuit and an indefatigable podcaster and tweeter on China and travel technology, says he will remain as an active advisor to UpTake, which is “in great shape.”

He says he doesn’t have specific plans to announce, but in the interim has put together, in stealth mode until now, Venture Sprout as a place to nurture some entrepreneurial and “unbloggable thoughts.”

And, another advertising/media network, the TripAdvisor Media Network, found its footing during the same era with hotels as its core business.

It would be simplistic to attribute the relative performance of these two advertising networks to that one key decision for each. But we all know which focus turned out to be the more strategic one as the much-largerTripAdvisor leads parent company Expedia Inc.’s media efforts around the world.

Orbitz Worldwide doesn’t break out the financial performance of its Away Network. A spokesman simply says OWW is “happy with its business performance.”

So now, the Away Network plans to play a little catch-up with TripAdvisor.

Eric Brodnax, the general manager of the Away Network, was coy about the timing, but at a bloggers summit in Chicago last week that Orbitz Worldwide put together, he described some new directions.

Brodnax says the Away Network will bolster its hotel coverage, and part of that means it will add hotel reviews.

That fits nicely with Orbitz Worldwide’s current obsession with building its global hotel business.

If you take them at their word, Orbitz Worldwide employees appear to be dreaming hotels, eating hotels, smoking hotels, 24/7.

Meanwhile, Lodging.com, an Away Network brand brought out of the mothballs a few months ago, will expand beyond its current focus on facilitated search for hotels, with all of those online travel agency booking engines, and will enter the experiential or inspirational travel realm, combining travel information with real-time pricing, Brodnax says.

For example, Lodging.com will show families what travel options they have if they want to go on vacation to Cape Cod, Mass., with two children and a $2000 trip budget.

This new thrust for Lodging.com sets it apart from the usual online travel agency penchant for moving consumers headlong down the booking path.

For example, Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford says Orbitz focuses on presenting the best hotel content to consumers after they have chosen their destination.

In contrast, it appears that Lodging.com will get involved in the trip-research phase, and will help people pick destinations and activities before drilling down with pricing and other information about their hotel choices.

It appears to be low-hanging fruit (Orbitz, focusing on quick bookings) versus inspiration higher-up the tree (Lodging.com).

Of this next phase of Lodging.com’s evolution with technology partner Vast,  Brodnax says: “This is not going to be an easy technology project.”

Asked whether the new thrust for Lodging.com will have parallels with websites like UpTake and TravelMuse,  Brodnax says there will be some parallels with UpTake, although there will be some distinctions, too.

“A lot of us in this space have been thinking about similar questions,” Brodnax says, pointing out that some of the answers to those questions will vary.

After all, a decade ago TripAdvisor and Away.com asked themselves similar questions and came up with different answers.