UpTake Networks announced today that it acquired RealTravel.com, a social hotel recommendation site. With the purchase, terms of which were not disclosed, UpTake aims to “accelerate their investment in the online travel research experience and drive more free, qualified leads back to travel sites”.

UpTake already operates UpTake.com, a semantic search engine designed to help travelers research and decide where to go, stay and what to do.

Yen Lee, co-founder of UpTake, explains the decision to buy Real Travel thusly:

“We acquired Real Travel because their product vision and approach are similar to UpTake.com, they have a highly talented team and they have a global footprint covering more than 200 countries.”

UpTake, which was formerly known as Kango and changed its name to UpTake Networks in March 2008, says it intends to continue to operate RealTravel.com as an independent site.

UpTake was initially founded in 2006 and is based in Palo Alto, California. The company has raised $14 million to date.

According to its CrunchBase profile, Real Travel has raised $1.8 million (from Mike Maples and Reid Hoffman, among others), although it appears some funding rounds are missing in the database. The fact that the latest press release to be published on Real Travel’s site dates back to July 2007 doesn’t help, of course.

UpTake, a travel search engine that specializes in helping users find travel ideas by taking a semantic approach to indexing destination descriptions and user comments across the Web, announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding.

The funding round was led by Trinity Ventures, which ostensibly believes UpTake has a bright future ahead of it. An initial look at the site’s stat shows that it is growing at a decent clip, but still very small.

According to comScore data, the site had 150,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, which was slightly below its July performance.  CEO Yen Lee explains that the slowdown in August was likely due to the site’s switch from its previous name, Kango, and notes that traffic has been growing 30 percent every month.  More than 90 percent of that comes from organic search and SEO.  He says:

Our business model works because we can be found where 73% of consumers start their travel research – in web search.

Considering it’s competing in a well-trodden space where sites like TripConnect and TripHub have failed, it’ll be interesting to see if the travel search engine can transition from an SEO-driven strategy to a more natural uptake.

If you are looking for ideas for a family vacation, a pet-friendly hotel, or the perfect place for a romantic weekend, try travel search engine UpTake. It is geared only for travel and looks for keywords in destination descriptions and user comments across the Web that help it place results into different travel buckets. It can understand about one million different travel-related keywords and phrases. Even “girl getaway.”

After coming out of stealth last fall (here’s my initial review) and changing its name from Kango to UpTake, today it is emerging out of private beta, so anyone can check it out. (The reason it changed its name was because it sold the URL to Hearst’s classifieds site Kaango, which wants it eventually as a redirect. The change avoids any future confusion, but I thought Kango was the better name).

Also, instead of just covering California and Hawaii, UpTake is offering national coverage for 400,000 hotels, which CEO Yen Lee claims is more than Expedia, TripAdvisor, or Yahoo Travel (where he used to be the general manager). UpTake crawls all of those sites and thousands of niche travel sites as well. Lee is also quickly moving to national coverage for destinations and activities.

Google already loves UpTake’s results. To see its semantic SEO magic at work, try searching for “pet friendly hotels gilroy” or “family hotels” and the name of any city in California. A result with a Kango URL will likely pop up near the top.