Mountain View, California — Community site Ruba evidently has something different under its hood from the countless other travel guides on the web and that is apparent from this blog post, Google has acquired online travel guide and community Ruba is a visual travel guide and tour review site that provides travelers with visual guides written by other travelers.
The company has only been in existence for around 15 months but the accumulation of what it calls “visual search” and community features has clearly caught Google’s attention. It has created a visual travel site and community with a focus on guides, photos, maps and interactive tour listings — all for enhancing the online travel research experience.
Google is most likely planning to augment its navigation service, Google Maps, since it has recently purchased the online travel guide Ruba, which is a dedicated community to provide visitors with journey reviews and visual guides created by other travelers.
Ruba offer users a means to visually sift through cities and their attractions around the world, providing photo-rich guides and an importance on making it easy to quickly discover new locations. However, the visual search characteristics of Ruba is corresponding to others working around the same idea of using images to spearhead the start of travel research, such as Fodors and 101Holidays.
But behind Ruba’s search process there is plenty of content, much of it user generated by what appears to be a reasonably active community. Guides are all written and presented by users, with Ruba extracting from Google and Flickr APIs to help chart out precise locations and provide some sample photos (users can submit their own, too). The site, which is similar in some ways to TripAdvisor, features integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect, allowing users to broadcast where they are headed and ask friends for input.
The blog post says:
“Hi friends, fans, and Ruba community members — exciting news from the Ruba team. We are thrilled to announce our team will be joining Google! As of Monday, May 24, we will be moving into the Google headquarters. We are totally excited to be joining such an amazing company. For the past 15 months, we have worked to create a unique and fun visual travel site and community focused on guides, photos, maps, and interactive tour listings to improve the online travel research experience. The Ruba community has written amazing travel reviews which have inspired our own journeys and hopefully yours as well,” the Ruba Team notes on the company’s blog.
“We want to thank the entire Ruba community (guide writers, local experts, bloggers, and more) for all you have done along the way. We would also like to thank our tour operator partners for sharing their tours on our site. Thank you for sharing your feedback, ideas, and of course your travel tips and experiences with our community.”
Unconfirmed reports suggest the Ruba site will be closed down within a few months and Google has simply acquired the technology and expertise.
Google has recently been making remarkable attempts to get in to the online travel business, incorporating hotel links into Maps and listing hotels with room rates. The search giant is also supposedly in talks to buy fare shopping software ITA software, according to the USA Today.
The site is developed by Mike Cassidy, who has also established a number of other successful companies, including Xfire, which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million. What is more, Cassidy’s co-founder and head of marketing there was David Lawee. Lawee is now vice president of corporate development at Google in charge of mergers and acquisitions, and he is buying his old boss’s new company.
However this is where the acquisition becomes intriguing, especially when pondering how Google will integrate the site, if at all. Although Google said it will integrate Ruba into its iGoogle personalized information service.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Ruba officials made the announcement via their blog late last week. Also, Cassidy himself tweeted the news, saying “Now I’m a Googler. Very excited!” Today, Ruba’s team will move into the Google headquarters.
Google and Ruba have yet to respond to media calls about the acquisition.