Kayak to take on UpTake (or is it the other way round)

Quick post, as I am running around today

Meta-search behemoth Kayak.com (poised to hit a billion searches in Q1 09) has announced that it is adding hotel review meta-search to its engine (care of HotelMarketing). Two interesting points caught my mind here:

1. Uptake.com (nee Kango) came to this model first and has raised money and profile to go after it. But Kayak clearly has traffic to burn; and

2. I interviewed Kayak's VP Communications Kellie Pelletier back in Jan last year after thier acqusition of Sidestep. At the time Sidestep had a lot of content assets (such as the now dead TripUp). Kellie made it clear to me that Kayak was not looking to pursue a content based strategy - rather would rely on their engineering lead to beat the OTAs and "regular" search companies. I am trying to decide if this move into meta-searching content is a change in strategy or not. On the one hand it is embracing content but on the other it is using engineering to collate and organise someone else's existing content.

Need to think about his more but Uptake - watch you back!