New Travel Site Moebii Provides Targeted Searches

New Travel Site Moebii Provides Targeted Searches
New travel Web site Moebii provides targeted searches for destination content
By ANNE WALLACE ALLEN For The Associated Press
November 9, 2009 (AP)

An online search of any major North American city will yield a flood of blogs, advertisements, and diarists' musings. A Google search of "Vancouver" alone yields 87 million hits. Narrow it down to "Vancouver dining" and you still get 8.3 million responses.

To help sort through this wealth of material, a pair of New Yorkers has created Moebii, a Web site that aggregates recent travel journalism and employs a user-rating system to keep its content current and on point.

A search of Vancouver on Moebii at http://www.moebii.com/pages/index.php yields a manageable 35 stories published since 2007, from sources like the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Frommers.com.

Moebii is also a good source for content that lets you get a feel for a place. A search of Varanasi, the sacred Hindu city on the Ganges River, pulls up only 13 entries, but many of them are thoughtful meditations that explore the meaning and the feel of the place. One is a mesmerizing Boston Globe photo essay showing a solar eclipse from Varanasi and other points in Asia last summer. What you're unlikely to find on Moebii: restaurant and hotel reviews, travel directions, weather, and other nuts and bolts of seeing a new place.

"The practical stuff is done, it's out there," said Chris Danielian, a former hedge fund manager who founded Moebii with his business partner Rob Celic this fall. Moebii steers readers to Wikipedia if they want more practical information.

"We're not trying to replace the guidebook," said Danielian. "What we're trying to do is fill in the gaps with hopefully great stories that we find on the site."

To keep Moebii's content on target, stories are tagged so they pop up under the right search. The site's selection of 50 stories about Florence, Italy, includes an article about street food in Saigon, Tuscany, and Marrakesh. The article was tagged to show up in a search for Florence because Florence is in Tuscany.


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Online travel sites are particularly helpful when they started but due to internet congestion, finding a destination became a chore, now lets hope this new site would change the way online travel sites operates these days.