In Search for Perfect Hotel Results, Hipmunk is Latest to Give it a Try

Does the hotel search result you view on an online travel site a perfect match, just in the ballpark or even irrelevant? Six-year-old metasearch site Hipmunk quietly began offering desktop-site visitors the ability to enter natural language queries such as, "I want a cheap hotel on the Upper West Side" in a bid to make searching easier and to provide more relevant results. Travelers type natural language keywords into a search field and receive corresponding results with real-time availability and rates. The update isn't immediately obvious and requires some guesswork to locate as there's no banner or text indicating users can perform such a search. But various keyword searches we tried yielded relevant results.