The Search Engine war started about a month ago when Yahoo dropped Google and started using their own algorithm. Beside the regular search, smaller battles are happening in related services. Some are affecting the travel space.

Take maps, for example. Yahoo introduced their new Yahoo Maps maps service last week. I was impressed. From a Tourism perspective, this is a very slick way of allowing users to search for Tourism related services and activities. Take this map for example where Hotels are plotted on a San Francisco map.

Today, Google launched their own version of this functionality with Google Local. It will plot any business on a map by combining Yellow Page listings with their index of web pages. It’s equally slick. From a trip planning perspective, it might
not be as efficient as the Yahoo map but the scope is so much bigger that users might use it for a lot more then travel planning and become so familiar with the service that they automatically will resort to this. The added benefit of using Google is that it will display web results. For example, a Hotel Search on Yahoo limits a user to the Yahoo booking system. On Google, a user has access to all websites, making it easier to compare prices. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Google will add that to their basket of services as well soon.