Looking for an airport?
Search is a really hard problem. For years and years companies have been trying to perfect web search, largely from the context of a web browser. It turns out that results that might be useful in the context of a browser are not all that useful in context of a the car. For example, look at the local search results for “Airport near Sunnyvale CA” from the major search providers:
Yahoo! Local
Google Maps
Live Search (Microsoft)
Ask City
In the context of the car, I am clearly looking for AIRPORTS near me (probably San Jose Int’l (SJC), San Francisco Int’l (SFO) or Oakland Int’l (OAK)) not limo services, hotels, taxi cab companies. Yet none of the search engines (as of this posting date) provide any of these airports in their top ten results.
Current portable navigation devices don’t have to deal with this issue since they just search the onboard points of interest database (POIs is the industry slang). Despite having an onboard POI database with Airports, testers of Dash 0.9 (the product that was tested by 2,000 people across the country) continuously typed in the term “Airport” into the Yahoo! Local search field.
We are thinking hard about how to improve this user experience and are excited about the role we can play in shaping the in car search experience.