Have you ever hunted for a hotel’s website using a search engine such as Google, only to be given dozens of listings for hotel booking agencies — but not the hotel itself? It’s frustrating, because it is often only the hotel’s own site that gives you photographs, room rates, and basic information such as contact details and directions.

Now internet search engines themselves are admitting that the situation is far from perfect for customers — with companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com saying they are working on ways of adapting searches to make it easier to find specific hotels.

There are now so many hotel booking and directory sites that internet users are often faced with lots of addresses such as www.tripadvisor.co.uk, www.hotels.com, www.travel-library.com, www.kayak.com and www.4hotels.com, rather than hotels’ main sites.

“We understand that it can be frustrating,” said Tony Macklin, vice-president for European product management at www.ask.com. “This is a really important issue and it’s something we’re constantly trying to better. Ideally, you would always get the hotel site at the top. But the problem is that general travel sites have invested a lot of money in designing their pages so our engines pick them up first.”

He added that smaller hotels often have not made this investment, so they are harder to find. “Where we recognise that a specific website ought to be at the top of the list where it is not, we will promote it. Web engines are still a young industry and we are constantly making refinements.”

A Times Travel test for two hotels, the Zanzibar Hotel in Hastings, East Sussex, and the Amphone Hotel in Brno in the Czech Republic, using Google, Britain’s favourite internet search engine, proved that there is still some way to go.

The search for the Zanzibar came up with www.thisistravel.co.uk, a Times Travel review of the hotel on www.timesonline.co.uk, www.visithastings.com, www.hotelclub.net, www.ratestogo.com, www.splut.com and www.rainbowtours.co.uk — in that order. The latter site was promoting holidays on the island of Zanzibar.

Meanwhile, the Amphone search came up with www.travel-library.com, www.4hotels.co.uk, www.timeout.com, www.2stay.com, www.a1tourism.com and www.yourfavouritehotels.com.

Neither the Zanzibar nor the Amphone could be found on either Google list (for the record, their sites are www.zanzibarhotel.co.uk and www.amphone.cz).

Lisa Jones, editor of .net, Britain’s biggest-selling monthly internet magazine, said: “It is not good for the consumer. People using the net want to see pictures of hotels and to see the prices.”

Jones believes that getting to the top of web searches is a “dark art” and that knowing how it works is “big business”. She said that a search engine that offered only hotel home pages, rather than booking sites, suggested by Times Travel, “sounds like a good idea”.

She said: “Travel is one of the leading products on the internet, along with financial services. But it’s got so huge, with so much choice and so many sites, that it can be bewildering. Things are not working if you can’t find basic sites.”

Google would not be drawn on why its searches do not sometimes put home sites at the top of lists. A spokesman said: “Sites’ positions are determined automatically based on a number of factors. We don’t manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site.

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Stephen Kaufer, president of www.tripadvisor.com, which recently set up www.tripadvisor.co.uk and has had more than four million hotel reviews on its pages in the past six years, said: “Sometimes hoteliers aren’t internet savvy, so their sites don’t come up. But if people look at our site they can often get a link either directly to the hotel or to a booking site. And they get to see what previous guests have thought of places.”