by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
What about taking all documented road trips ever and building with AI on top of them? Curiosio v19 is doing exactly that. We are crawling the web to ingest travel stories recorded by people through the years. Then we allow searching on them — like googling just for road trips. And finally, our AI is helping create your curious journey inspired by the travel story you love.
Human intelligence has been recorded in the text on paper (books and mags, travelogues), digital (books and magazines, websites, blogs, encyclopedias); photos collections (Flickr, Facebook, Instagram); videos (YouTube). Our first attempt is text. We took text road trips from the web and made a road trip search engine. In this post, we are showcasing how it works.
Search Engine for Road Trips
Here is a demo of how the Find page works. First, we are searching for American road trips to/in New England, then Great Lakes trips, then Art Deco, and finally a weird and literally “bad” for fun returning Breaking Bad tour in Albuquerque. Second, we are searching for Niagara road trips in Canada. Third, we’re finding journeys related to the Appian Way in Italy.
Curiosio did not crawl the entire web [yet]. For the beginning, we are indexing credible sources such as National Geographic, Travel+Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Wikivoyage, etc. If you rarely notice a road trip story by Vogue or New Yorker don’t be surprised — we crawled and indexed them all.
Find and Supertrip
Let’s dig deeper into what happens when you find the trip you like. You are clicking or tapping it and getting this a bit expanded look:
A click on “Go to the article” will take you to the travel story on the web. In this example, it will be Breaking Bad Tour on Wikivoyage. That flow looks and works like a standard web search engine with an additional click/tap. The magic happens when you hit the red button [Plan a Road Trip]. Could you guess at this point what it does? Hint: think of the [Supertrip] button.
Below is an example of how you could take Nils Holgersson’s Journey Across Sweden and make your own custom trip from it by reusing the points and places, adding/removing points and places, setting your dates and duration, number of travelers, budget, etc. This will happen automatically when you hit the big red [Plan a Road Trip] button.
This magic is currently being created and tested in the Lab. Stay tuned to the next release when we unlock the red button. Meanwhile, explore the collection of road trips from the web by clicking “Go to the article”.
All Travelogues to Interactive Trip Plans
Eventually, Curiosio will offer interactive trip plans for any travelogue instantly. When you click the web link — below the red button and the reference to the article — you will have a carousel of relevant options that you could start exploring immediately.
The more trip plans created for the articles from the same source such as Natgeo the more content we [all] produce for the Natgeo carousel in My Trips. We renamed My Trips to CURIOSITY. You are exploring and planning by following your curiosity. Hence, the name for the saved, liked, searched, and viewed trips.
All anonymous users will contribute to the creation of the interactive content. Signed-in users have privacy — could opt out from sharing their creations. Only signed-in users could consume the Natgeo or other “channels” with tons of trip plans in the CURIOSITY area. You could read more about our concept of Netflix for Trips and technical Netflix for Trips.
Next
Ship the next version with the [Plan a Road Trip] button fully functional. We will be working on the Knowledge Graph to release more countries. We will crawl and index more of the road trips on the web. We are going to bring the trip plan description to the human-friendly level — something like Lonely Planet did in their cool guidebooks. All this will be done by AI. Some parts with ML, NLP. Other parts with Evolutionary AI. Maybe we will post a few more interesting technical stories on our blog.
We tested in the latest Chrome browsers, also in Firefox, and mobile DuckDuckGo. The website should work in Safari though we did not test it. Any curious travelers with Safari browsers? You could contribute to the creation of Curiosio — the traveler’s superguide — https://curiosio.com.
Thank you for reading or scrolling or skimming down here. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity.
