This day in search marketing history: January 23

Expedia buys Travelocity

In 2015, Expedia bought rival Travelocity for $280 million amid sluggish travel industry growth and pressure from insurgent travel providers.

Expedia had actually been powering Travelocity.com since 2013. So the acquisition seemed quite logical from both perspectives.

At the time, Expedia also owned several online travel brands: Hotels.com, Hotwire, eLong and Trivago.

Read all about it in Travel Search Consolidation: Expedia Buys Rival Travelocity For $280M

Also on this day

Neeva seeks to expand user base with free subscriptions

2022: The free basic subscription was an alternative to its full-featured subscription, which cost $4.95 per month.

Google removes ‘ads’ and ‘sponsored’ labels from flight search results

2020: There would be no more referral fees from partners in flight search, as Google sought to emphasize price and convenience in rankings.

Google Dataset Search is out of beta and adds new features

2020: Google added new features to Google Dataset Search with this rollout.

Video: Search pioneer Mike Grehan on everything from the early days of SEO to AI’s role in paid and organic search

2020: In this installment of Barry Schwartz’s vlog series, he chatted with Grehan about the early days of search, how technology like AI and machine learning are impacting search and who originally came up with term “search engine optimization.”

Amazon adds customer acquisition metrics for Sponsored Brands campaigns

2019: The “new-to-brand” set of metrics were also available for Amazon sellers’ display and video ad campaigns.

Searchmetrics wins important victory in patent infringement lawsuit

2018: A federal judge invalidated five patents SEO platform provider BrightEdge claimed in lawsuit against competitor Searchmetrics.

Bing Hotel Ads moving out of beta to general release with Koddi

2018: After running its Hotel Ads offering in beta in 2017, Bing Ads rolled them out widely.

Google mobile search adds book previews

2017: You could now read book previews directly on your smartphone from Google search.

Ed Roberts activist Google Doodle honors leader of the disability rights movement

2017: The Google Doodle paid tribute to Ed Roberts, co-founder of the World Institute on Disability.

Automatic AdWords Currency Conversion Now Enabled In Google Analytics

2015: Advertisers using a different currency in AdWords and Analytics would now be able to easily compare cost data in Analytics.

PLAs Drove 56% Of Non-Brand Google AdWords Clicks In Q4 [RKG]

2015: Click share also rose on Bing’s product ads, doubling from Q3.

Pinterest Search Is Now Customized By Gender

2015: Pinterest adjusted its Guided Search system to serve results that differed depending on whether the user was female or male.

News Aggregator SmartNews Shows Rapid Growth, Adds Local Channels

2015: Local news became available for 12 US cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Seattle and Boston.

Search In Pics: Google Glass Mug, Google Pool Table & Gmail Paper

2015: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site

2014: There was no way to search for an HTTPS version of a “what is my referrer” site. So Barry Schwartz made one.

Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing

2014: The new smartphone user-agent crawler would follow robots.txt, robots meta tag, and HTTP header directives for Googlebot instead of Googlebot-Mobile

MapQuest Transfers Local Listings Management To Yext

2014: MapQuest notified business users that its local business center and basic local listings product would be formally shutting down.

Google Loses Again In AdWords Patent Infringement Case

2014: A judge determined patent-holding company Vringo was entitled to additional royalties from Google in a patent infringement case involving Google AdWords.

Google Launches Streamlined Image Search

2013: With the new system made it easier to quickly skim through multiple images, rather than the old system that requires a lot of clicking, then closing windows to go back and select a new image.

New Tumblr Blog Raises Privacy Concerns Over Facebook Graph Search

2013: Examples of searches that were a mix of comedy and creepiness.

“Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+

2012: The companies behind the tool felt Google hadn’t focused on what was best for its users with Search Plus Your World.

Google Search Showing Results For Punctuation Marks

2012: In the past, Google ignored most punctuation marks and didn’t show any useful results for them.

Projecting 2012 Google Mobile Revenues: $4 or $6 Billion?

2012: The Google 2012 mobile revenue “run rate” range was projected to be between $4 billion and $6 billion (globally). In the US the figure would probably be just over half the number.

A Proposal For Social Network Détente

2012: Some suggestions for how a social-nuclear war between Google, Twitter and Facebook could be averted.

Searching For Old Versions of Web Sites? The Wayback Machine Is New and Improved

2011: The Wayback Machine was redesigned and relaunched with a nicer user interface and migrated to a new platform as a foundation for further improvements.

Google To Push Semantic Search In 2009?

2009: “Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.