by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
Massive news! Today we are releasing a new smarter and faster version of Curiosio. Formally it is Beta4. We stop counting Betas after this release. Latest and smartest Curiosio will always be available at curiosio.com and curios.io.
Search Engine
Curiosio is a search engine to help leisure travelers discover & experience places between different points of the journey. Curiosio is superhuman artificial smartness to map out an interesting road trip under conditions of time & money. The killer function is the relevance of multi-day multi-point search results and interaction with the search results. So is our focus.
Landing Page
Go to curiosio.com to land. The Search block on top is almost unchanged since Beta3. New stuff is a Wall. The Wall is scrollable space below the Search. Various lists of trips are located on the Wall.
Look carefully again at the screenshot. It contains curious journeys in the US. The US works in the Lab, faster and faster with each week.
Search
We added a counter of points. It is displayed in the right bottom corner; you could see a similar indication on Twitter. If you exceed the limit, the indicator turns red and shows how many points to remove to stay below the limit. The limit is high — we allow up to 20 points to search with.
Wall
There are lists of trips. Your search results are always in the top list. The search results are ordered by the relevance score — most relevant trips are on the left. Only hot search results are ordered.
Other lists are not ordered, though some grouping takes place. There will be Popular, Trending, Themed, Liked, etc. lists, based on search data. We are not going to store user data. Instead, we plan to recognize user intent from the search interaction.
Trips
You can open a trip in two ways: search for any trip in geographic + time + money conditions, or open a trip from a list from the Wall. The opened trips will look almost identical except the calendar dates and the buttons.
The newly searched trip will always have the dates because you searched between real dates. Other trips from the Wall will be opened without any dates because those trips happened in the past and their dates are irrelevant now; only duration matters.
Buttons
[Re-search] button allows you to repeat the search with the same parameters. You can re-search with identical parameters or change some of them or all of them, before clicking [GET TRIP] red button.
[Supertrip] is an attempt to search for a new trip with the maximum overlap with the current trip you are deriving from. You can bend the original trip by a start point, finish point, waypoints, duration, budget, number of travelers, cars, comfort, intensity. Curiosio will search for a new trip in all new conditions.
This is geeky:
[Supertrip] is conceptually different from [Re-search]. Supertrip fills more search parameters for you. But if you edit auto-filled values heavily, then both actions become equivalent.
[Pin to Cal] button allows pinning the trip to the calendar, to set the dates. You only point a start date, we know the trip duration. It’s OK to re-pin the trip to a different date again, so repeat this as many times as you need.
[Navigate] sends the route to Google Maps, so that you have turn-by-turn navigation in your car. It’s even possible to send directions directly to car.
Booking
We brought booking back, in the form of finding. Curiosio is a connector to the information. You make decisions, you do actions, powered by the information given to you by Curiosio.
Rooms for the overnight points can be connected by clicking Find room links. You will see available rooms in the vicinity, pre-filtered by dates, number of travelers, comfort and price levels. The trip must be bound to dates to have Find room link; click [Pin to Cal] if you opened a trip without dates.
Car pick-up and drop-off points could be connected to the start and finish points of the journey by clicking Find car link. You will see available cars for rent in the vicinity, pre-filtered by dates, comfort, price, numbers. The trip must be bound to dates to have Find car link; click [Pin to Cal] if you opened a trip without dates.
Flights are barely connected because we don’t know where are you flying from to the start point of your journey, and we don’t know where are you flying to from the finish point of your journey. It is too many data points to ask for, the interface would be cluttered; so we decided to go without flights for now. Find flights link will navigate you to the empty search page for flights.
Other
We added miles and now show mileage in kilometers and miles. We added numbers of nights for the points where you need to sleep. Slightly changed wording everywhere. A cool one is a permutation from geek travel to travel geek in the tagline \m/
Tested only in Google Chrome browser. Usually, the web app works in other browsers, though visual discrepancies are possible, such as off by pixel or so.
Now it worth to go to curiosio.com to play with your imagination about the next big road trip.
Next
What we will do next? We will release the United States in this new user interface. The knowledge graph is ready. We are working on the real-time performance, to reach absolutely usable system response time (within 20 seconds and faster on 2GHz cores; we already broke through 50 seconds). Check out American progress and interesting details here:
If you are new to Curiosio, here is an introduction with four travel-life scenarios:
