But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking-a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries-and we wanted to let people know what's going on.

More importantly, these generic destination-type searches far outpace the volume of hotel-brand specific queries, which is why it’s critical for hotels to rank prominently in local search results.

The second problem is the fact that there is no ranking for the search results, hits are returned not according to how relevant they are to the search query, but simply if they match the query or not.