Yahoo! recently took FareChase out of beta and began integrating FareChase information into Yahoo! Search results. For the week ending May 13, 2006 Yahoo! FareChase ranked at number 14 in the Travel – Agencies category, with market share of 0.65% of category visits, while Yahoo! Travel ranked at number 6, with a market share of 6.04%.
Last week Yahoo! Travel was the most popular travel agency site receiving visits from Yahoo! Search, accounting for 0.19% of Yahoo! Search’s downstream. Yahoo! Farechase was the number 6 travel agency site receiving visits from Yahoo! Search, with 0.07% of downstream visits. This prompts the question: how is Yahoo! Search differentiating the traffic they send to Yahoo! FareChase versus Yahoo! Travel?

This gives us the perfect opportunity to use Hitwise Search Term Gap Analysis to reveal the differences. The gap analysis summary shows that there are only 9 highly competitive terms for the two sites, but more than 16,000 terms from which Yahoo! Travel is receiving a higher volume of traffic, and over 1,000 terms from which Yahoo! FareChase is receiving more traffic. Below are side by side lists of exclusive terms for each of the sites for the four weeks ending May 13, 2006. We can see from these lists that Yahoo’s strategy is to show links for Yahoo! Travel on destination and map searches, while searchers for airlines are shown the FareChase links. Clearly, gap analysis can be a powerful tool for uncovering competitive search strategies.