It has been my experience that more often than not, aggregator sites don't provide any value whatsoever because their only mission is to display ads and drive traffic by spamming Google's index. At least travel adviser sites offer some benefit if they host real reviews (instead of just showing scraped content like the hotel's address and some images).

This is one symptom of a larger problem where I feel Google search is falling flat and the quality of search results is getting progressively worse. It's not the fault of the aggregator sites themselves, either (though some of them employ very shady SEO tricks) - instead I believe the problem is that Google search increasingly ignores specific user input to serve up "what I most likely meant as opposed to what I actually typed in". I would welcome a return to stricter search phrases and maybe a few options regarding what search mode I would like to use. For example, it would be nice to be able to explicitly include or exclude aggregator sites in search results. By now, Google certainly knows enough about the nature of the URLs it indexes, they should pass this knowledge on and empower their users to make more specific queries.

> aggregator sites don't provide any value whatsoever because their only mission is to display ads and drive traffic by spamming Google's index

Tripadvisor has been really helpful to me and my wife, as in we don't go to any new hotel without first checking its ratings and comments on tripadvisor. You cannot have that on a hotel's website, objective reviews I mean, nor can you have actual non-photoshopped pictures taken inside said hotels.

Seems like "drake hotel" ought to get you to the Drake Hotel web site. "drake hotel reviews" ought to get you to an aggregator. "drake hotel reservations" ought to get you to whichever has the better prices.

Google's emphasis on domain name helps a lot here, though a lot of hotels are owned by holding companies and have domain names like: http://holdingco.com/hotelname (hard to differentiate between that and an aggregator URL).

It comes down to inbound links-- and the aggregators have armies of people doing link-building SEO work. I don't envy Google. Short of human editors, how would you fix it?

Hotels online are a bit of a mess.

Personally I'll go straight to Tripadvisor to find a hotel in an unfamiliar area. I may book there but I will also call the hotel in question, particularly when my company has a corporate rate. Not because the corporate rate is betteer but because when the website tells you the hotel is full for the requested dates a person at the hotel will tell you what dates are the problem and possibly bump you up to a higher room class to make your stay possible.

As an aside to people who develop hotel aggregates:

1. Never make me register;

2. When I search a date range show me, for each day, the rate, availability and include all room classes. This way I can easily see if a single day is the problem and adjust accordingly.

In fact I'd like to combine the hotel and flight so one one page I can see flight costs on my requested dates (+/- 2 days) and the matrix of per day rates and availabilities.

All sites I've seen have these as too many separate steps. What's worse, refining the search can be problematic.

As for Google search results, this is one area where there is simply too much noise. Hotel affiliate programs combined with cheap hosting mean thee are 234245556345 aggregators, almost all of them useless and hotel sites, except for the largest chains generally, tend to be useless.

Depends if the aggregator has reviews from previous customers or not, if they do then I would say it's a better source of information than the hotel website itself. Google probably thinks your more likely to be searching for reputation information on a particular hotel than stuff like "address" e.t.c.

Interesting, because I prefer the aggregator sites.

The aggregator sites usually contain some user reviews as well as a standardized UI - one I'm already familiar with - for booking a room. On the larger aggregators, I've also already got an account with some of my booking information saved. I also believe (perhaps irrationally) that buying through a large aggregator is more secure than buying through some random hotel site's booking solution.

If Google were to bump TripAdvisor in favor of direct links to hotel sites, Google would become less useful for me.

The same is true, as an aside, for restaurant websites vs. Yelp.

The problem with the aggregator sites is that they tend to hide links to the original site, email addresses and phone numbers, in order to get you to book a room through their system.

Of course, and that's how it should be. They've added the value, so they should make the money.

They don't hide hotel name and usually you can google hotel website easily using that.

This one's debatable. I actually look at tripadvisor before the hotel's own web site for the reviews, and information on other nearby properties. (Hotels' own web sites are often... aspirational: http://www.oyster.com/hotels/photo-fakeouts/) That said, I do look at the hotel's own site too, but I've never personally seen a case where it wasn't on Google's first page.

Does Google capture and use data on which of its search links people actually click on ? It seems like that information would be a very useful adjunct to PageRank for ranking search results.

They could then determine an optimal ranking by maximizing the likelihood that the user will click on the top result presented.

In fact, I believe they even capture how many users click a result and then quickly come back (back button), which indicates a result that looks good in the search results list, but that is disappointing when users actually view the page.

They do, it's been bugging the shit out of me the last week because every time I go to copy/paste a result link it's a mess.

Aggregators provide a lot of use.

Gives an instant overview of the hotels prices and ratings. It would take a long time to research just that basic information for say 10 hotels in an area.

Another question: Would it be unfair for Google to redirect to a page where it's making money (via affiliate link)?