The whiteboards in hotel metasearch offices on several continents must be filled these days with freshly penned scrawlings and ideas in response to Google's experimental launch of hotel search via the manipulation of shapes on a map.
Google Hotel Finder enables you to "draw simple shapes to define the neighborhoods (yes, more than one!) that interest you," Google says.
So, you can redraw a default shape Google Hotel Finder provides and hone in on a section of Chicago, for example, to find hotels in a neighborhood of interest like this:
The shape in Google Hotel Finder can be a bit difficult to manipulate, especially when you are trying to view neighborhoods in hotel-crowded tourist areas, and the user experience is very gray.
Things brighten up when you click one of the blue dots and get hotel details, including reviews.
But, compare and contrast the way Google handles its new hotel search by shapes with Lasso Search on HotPads.com, a real estate and hotel search engine.
If you are looking for an apartment rental on HotPads in the Fenway section of Boston, for instance, you merely grab a lasso icon, drag it to the Fenway area on your map and "lasso" the area where you might want to rent.
You can then select a apartment building icon and view rental deals in a window that opens like this with the lassoed section still open at left:
Is the HotPads Lasso Search more user-friendly than the way Google does it?
Play around with it yourself and decide.
Paul Gleger, a HotPads spokesman, notes that "whereas Google relies on four points to narrow down an area, HotPads allows the user to draw at the pixel level, creating literally any shape that might match the desired location."
In addition, users can name their Lasso and share it with friends, and they can opt to receive notifications about new rentals coming on the market within their self-drawn Lassos, Gleger says.
The Lasso tool debuted in March 2011, Gleger adds.
What the HotPads Lasso Search and shape search in Google Hotel Finder have in common is that both enable you to view apartment rentals or hotel details, respectively, while giving you the ability to continue your search on the same page.
In addition, both HotPads and Google Hotel Finder enable users to manipulate more than one shape on a map.
You can expect this sort of searching to evolve into various incarnations.
A key question is whether masses of consumers will find this sort of search useful for hotels or merely a frill for the most geeky among us.