About Travel In Papers and how it works

What is Travel In Papers

Travel In Papers is a simple yet effective resource for searching newspapers for travel related articles and stories.

All of the sources featured use existing open source technology such as RSS to help you get the most out of the content that newspapers publish online.

In this first release, the UK edition, we have built a search engine for the travel sections of 5 of the UK’s leading national newspapers:

In addition, we have also chosen to display headlines taken from the RSS feeds openly distributed by all of the newspapers above with the exception of the Financial Times (FT), which currently does not have a feed dedicated to ‘Travel’.

How it works

Once you have entered your search criteria the results will appear on a hosted Google page. We have provided filters for each of the newspapers so from this point forward you can drill down your search to just one particular newspaper by clicking on the relevant newspaper labelled ‘refine results’.

The Travel In Papers search engine is trained to search just the websites of the newspapers featured, although you will also have the option of searching the web should you need to.

The RSS feeds are handy too because the first tab labelled ‘Round Up’ gives you an up-to-date snapshot of the latest travel articles for each of the newspapers featured. You can also subscribe to the round up by simply clicking on the RSS icon.

In each of the newspaper tabs we have provided links to the newspaper websites and also a link to the RSS feed for their respective travel sections. Again, you can subscribe to these feeds directly from Travel In Papers by clicking on the RSS icon displayed.

Why we made it

Partly because we can’t resist tinkering around with fantastic new technology such as RSS (we can’t imagine using the internet before RSS, but use it we did) and partly because we needed something like this for our own use.

Our main work is in curating Holiday Pad, a holiday and vacation ideas site for people who love to go on holiday. As part of our ongoing research we monitor the main newspapers’ travel sections every weekend. It was becoming increasingly time consuming typing in all the URLs relating to their articles, and finding stuff using plain vanilla Google was a bore.

How we made it

The idea to build Travel In Papers was initially inspired by Chipwrapper who openly encourage anyone to build upon the work they have so generously made public. Although their source code is freely available, we didn’t need to use it. Instead we built TiPs ourselves using Chipwrapper as our inspiration. They showed us what is possible, and how it’s possible, and we just applied their idea to the field of travel.

TiPs was built using Yahoo Pipes, an amazing piece of kit which allows anyone to remix RSS feeds, or create data ‘mash ups’ as they are known. We’ve only scratched the surface with it but in more capable hands some amazing stuff can be built. However, just messing around with it in the creation of this site lead to some fresh ideas for future projects.

The other component we used was Google Co-op for our custom search engine. This was staggeringly simple to set up!

A useful resource

To give an example of how useful Travel In Papers has been so far, we recently featured the modern igloos at the Hotel Arctic and through using TiPs we discovered that the novelist Irvine Welsh had not only stayed there but had written an article for The Observer about his experience of visiting Greenland.

So we were able to incorporate that little nugget into our feature and link to it. That means our audience can easily find his article when researching their trip to Greenland. Forgive the pun but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

We can envisage Travel In Papers being very useful for the following groups of people:

  • Travel journalists
  • Travel bloggers
  • PR agencies
  • Marketers
  • Travel companies
  • Tour operators
  • Holiday rental owners
  • Regular people looking for travel inspiration

More to follow

As you may have guessed, our next move is to build localised versions for the USA, Canada and Australia. With France, Spain and Germany following shortly after.

Also on the drawing board is a social media module which will search and display travel related user generated content from the following sites:

By the way, if anyone out there reading this knows how to create a search plugin for Firefox then please drop us a line.

Disclaimer

Travel In Papers is not associated with any of the newspapers featured in the Google search results. The sponsored links you see on the results page are contextually served by Google and we do not have any association with the companies advertising using this method.

Please be aware that by clicking on any of the sponsored links on the results page, a share of the revenue will be earned by Travel In Papers. This helps us continue the development and hosting of this free service.

Contact us

Coming soon… the means by which to contact us once we’ve figured out an effective system to keep the knobhead spam merchants at bay, which is proving a bigger challenge than actually building this site!