I love travel planning: sketching routes, searching for sights and activities, reading travel books. While I always change my plans spontaneously, travel research inspires me about where I’m going and helps me to know what options I have when I land, even if I change my plans ten times over the course of a day.
Some of the information I find is in blogs, others on social media or in travel guides. I have to constantly switch between platforms to search for things and compare notes and suggestions. It’s not convenient.
Fortunately, there is a new tool that allows travelers to find the best things to see and do on their travels (and also at home). It will bring all your research together in one place.
It’s called leaderboard.
What is Bestlist?
Bestlist is a search engine that focuses solely on helping you discover the best of everything. Restaurants, beaches, activities, excursions, historical sites — you name it.
They crawl the web, aggregate millions of data points, ratings and comments, and process everything with their proprietary machine learning models. They measure popularity, mood and more, providing users with the best options for each search query.
Whether you are planning a trip and looking for inspiration and suggestions or just looking for a place to eat in your hometown, Bestlist can help you.
As soon as you perform a search on Bestlist, you will see that each result contains a short description and a link to an external site. You can then browse your list and save your favorite results in a collection. You can have collections for everything: websites, attractions, restaurants, activities, etc.
So far I have four collections (they are of course all travel related):
- Things to do in Amsterdam
- The best of Thailand
- The best travel resources
- The best credit cards for Travelers
- The more often you use the site, the more things you can add to your collections. Collections are easy to create, rearrange and expand. (More about this below.)
Three features that distinguish Bestlist
Here’s a quick look at three other features of Bestlist that I think really help the platform stand out from everyone else:
1. Vote: If you care about a search result, you can vote up or down the entry to express your opinion. The more upvotes a thing receives, the higher it will be displayed in the search results (and the more downvotes it receives, the lower it will be displayed). When you vote, you will be asked to indicate why you voted, which will give other users a better insight into the listing. This means that you can not only help shape the results, but also see why others voted the way you did. This makes the results much more transparent than just a thumbs up or thumbs down.
2. Submissions: If you find that something is not found in a particular search result, you can submit it as a suggestion using a button below. Just add the name and URL of the new entry, and it will be reviewed and published when it makes the cut. So if something cool is not found from your hometown or you discover a great website worth sharing, you have the potential to add it to improve the platform for everyone else.
3. Data Protection: Your personal data will not be disclosed to advertisers or other third parties. This is a big deal, because as we all know, search engine data is full of personal information about you. I really like this feature.
