If you’re one of the millions who use Google to search online for flights, hotels and hire cars, you probably think you’re saving yourself time and money. In fact, you might be wasting both. Research suggests that the world’s most popular website is missing out on many bargain prices and forcing internet users into the arms of industry giants.

When it comes to sifting information, Google is the un- disputed king. If you want to know the gestation period of the African elephant or the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody, there is no better place to look. But try searching for the lowest air fare to Prague, or a cheap family holiday in Orlando, and Google gets confused, throwing up many thousands of websites, a few of which have paid large sums of money to come near the top of the results.

Fed up with negotiating a mire of useless information, savvy surfers are now turning to a new generation of “spidering” sites that search through dozens of online retailers for the cheapest hotels, flights and hire cars. Some of these are emerging as the new giants of online travel, others are obscure little sites put together by enthusiastic amateurs.

Take, for example, the deceptively simple www.hotelscomparison.com, set up by Liam Lyon, a British software developer, in his spare room. It doesn’t sell anything; instead, it searches the pages of 18 hotel discounters that, between them, have access to 160,000 hotels.

The home page has a drop-down menu that allows users to search for hotels in a specific city over a choice of dates, with the option of choosing a star rating and even the name of the hotel. Using a process known as “screen-scraping”, the site then finds the best prices and provides direct links to the relevant booking pages.

Compare that with Google. Although it offers an advanced search facility, most users simply search through the front page, which has just one box where you can type in a choice of search words.

Suppose you are looking for somewhere smart to stay in Amsterdam. Last week, we googled the words “discount five-star hotel Amsterdam” and were offered 42,000 results. If you had the time and patience to compare even a small number of these, you would find that many are different shop fronts for the same companies.

Another problem is that websites spend large sums to appear on Google, and are forced to pass on those costs to customers. There are two ways companies can get exposure on Google: either by bidding to occupy one of the sponsored links at the top and right-hand side of each page, or by tweaking their sites to try to get near the top of the unsponsored results. Both are expensive.

The cost of a sponsored link depends on the popularity of the search words. For instance, if you type in “Paris hotels”, you will get about 1.5m results in the UK alone. Getting to the top of this list is the holy grail. Last week, the sponsored link at the top of the page was selling for £3.27 per click. This means that every time a user clicks to the featured site, the owners pay Google £3.27. Not every “click-through” results in a sale, so some companies are clearly paying a lot to reach their customers.

Many internet users assume that, while sponsored links on search engines are bought and sold, regular results are based purely on relevance. Not true. Search engine optimisation (SEO) software enables firms to bury coded words into their web pages, forcing them up the lists of results. SEO is a black art and doesn’t come cheap: some companies pay thousands per month to SEO providers (Google receives no money) to have their sites tweaked.

The owners of travel websites say the costs of appearing on Google have risen sharply. Lyon says that two years ago, his site occupied eighth position on Google for the search words “Edinburgh hotels”. Despite all his technical know-how, it has now fallen to 200th place.

“It’s hopeless,” he says. “Last year, I spent a month trying to get back into the top rankings, but the competition was so fierce that I made no progress at all and gave up on it.”

As the number of UK travel websites continues to grow (by 28% last year, according to the online analyst Hitwise), some unscrupulous companies have even managed to wriggle to the top of the results pages by burying better-known rivals in their own web pages. Last month, it was reported that Thomson, Thomas Cook and First Choice had used copyright laws to stop smaller companies from using their names on web pages in a bid to make Google’s top 10.