TripAdvisor cuts hundreds of jobs after Google competition bites

It's been going on a long time, Google's been killing off aggregators by cannibalising their market for almost a decade now.

I do wonder how sustainable it is, previously these aggregators did lots of things at Google's request, cleaning the noise out and laying everything out in nice data-annotations. More fool them, it turns out.

Google cross-references them all, builds their 'own' data and drives them all out of business.

It's pretty scary how much of the digital high streets Google has ruthlessly stolen from us all, and imposing a huge tax for doing pretty much sod all.

I occasionally wonder if anyone would every have the balls to nationalise the search engine, it should be a public utility, not infested with ads covering 90% of the first page as it's become. I'm even semi-serious :)

At the very least I wouldn't mind a nice ruling that Google are now deceptively calling themselves a search engine, and that they can now only show one ad per 10 real results per page.

I really prefer TripAdvisor data and reviews, but it is really difficult to compete to a monopoly. Google also is better at search and integrates better with their own service.

If at least they would allow me to download any city data in advance in their app. It used be possible to download the main cities in advance, but now you must have internet always on. They think that in any country you have internet everywhere.

Reposting myself on the subject[1]:

For anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence Google’s naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is entirely the result of a decade long SEO play.

(Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516006

"Nationalised search service" ... interesting thought. Legions of Librarians, finally compensated justly and lauded for their heroism. Wonder if they'd get uniforms and "be all you can be" recruiting campaigns too.

This along with the comment about them being in the SP500 got me interested. They are doing more than just the site we all immediately thought of when we saw "TripAdvisor". There's also "InstantBooking" [0], widgets, tools, a platform (it seems) for marketing/buying sponsored listings, analytics, "photo tools", and probably more. All of that was just from what they listed on products. Besides this, they are surely doing research, prototyping, and otherwise developing products that haven't/may never see the light of day.

Furthermore, they seem to do a lot of marketing which for them is the obvious stuff like online advertising (probably in-house team), conferences, and I'm guessing also local events. They also do non-obvious stuff such as branding one of little shops inside the Toronto Pearson International Airport [1].

Finally, looking at LinkedIn, here's the breakdown of employees.

1,100 sales 939 engineering 768 operations 652 bizdev and so on. Full screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/JCoibId

Obviously, there must be some overlap in job functions here, otherwise people are over-reporting that they are employees at the company (LinkedIn claims 5,679 employees). 160 people doing finance doesn't make sense, for instance (well at least imo).

The only conclusion I can make from this data is that they aren't having thousands of people working on just the main website. I'm inclined to guess that they ARE probably bloated, but without knowing anything besides some marketing copy for their other projects, it's hard to say with any confidence.

[0] https://www.tripadvisor.com/InstantBooking [1] https://www.torontopearson.com/en/while-you-are-here/toronto...