Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP) is entering the search engine marketplace with a hospitality industry-specific search engine, called Pineapplesearch.com.
The search engine is an aggregated content website that focuses on news, articles and reports of primary interest to the hospitality industry, with priority placed on information-based results.
“There are multiple channels for locating information in our connected world, but it is actually a difficult task to sort through the layers of irrelevant results returned when doing a search. And that’s where the idea for Pineapplesearch came in,” said HFTP global vice president Lyle Worthington, CHTP a hospitality IT consultant. “HFTP’s goal is to be the authoritative, information source for the industry and we saw this as an opportunity to build something useful for our members and the industry at large.”
Pineapplesearch brings together content from industry-specific RSS feeds, publications, reports, feature articles, white papers and more. The site goes beyond a basic search engine with its highly-customizable features that allow users to narrow search results, as well as tailor the site to hospitality-specific interests. In a basic search, a user can narrow results by: date, information type, category and region.
Registered users can also sign-up for news alerts on pre-selected topics, build a must read list and save queries for future use. It also has a leaderboard across the top with information blocks on the search topic and a database of hospitality-related companies.
“When we started developing Pineapplesearch with HFTP, we wanted to build something that was innovative and immediately recognized as a resource that fills a void,” said Henri Roelings, founder of hsyndicate.org. “We added in a collection of tools that a user will be able to use to make the site his/her own and, hopefully, not want to start anywhere else when looking for professional information.”
The site officially launched on Wed., Oct. 21, 2015, at the opening of the HFTP Annual Convention & Tradeshow in Bellevue, Wash.. HFTP will continue to demonstrate the site at upcoming industry events.
