A search on Kayak.com will now allow users to access TripAdvisor.com hotel reviews.

If you’re the type of traveler who searches for hotels on Kayak.com and then clicks over to TripAdvisor.com to read reviews from other travelers, the two companies would like you to stop.

Clicking from one site to the other, that is.

On Thursday, the sites unveiled a new arrangement in which the results from Kayak searches will include TripAdvisor reviews. Combining meta-search and user reviews, the companies hope to streamline the user experience and adapt to the changing landscape of online travel.

“We’re very comprehensive in search, but TripAdvisor has great content that people find very valuable,” said Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer. “This is just one more thing to add into the mix to help people find the right hotel for them.”

Under the new arrangement, TripAdvisor content will be another filter that people can toggle on or off. The results can also be ordered according to their TripAdvisor ranking, which brings up the review site’s familiar, five-category (Excellent to Terrible) bar charts.

The announcement is among Kayak’s ongoing efforts to augment its meta-search offerings. In October, the site added reviews from Frommer’s and Budget Travel, which can also be toggled on or off based on users’ preferences.

“Some people don’t like user reviews,” said Birge. “We’re giving people the choice depending on what kind of content they want to read.”

Kayak, of course, is not the first website to incorporate TripAdvisor ratings. Spun off from Expedia.com in December, the site's reviews appear on the websites of more than 250 companies, including hotels, airlines and online travel agencies.

But the move can also be seen as the latest skirmish in a battle that pits Kayak and TripAdvisor against Google, which has clearly set its sights on online travel with a series of acquisitions (ITA Software, Zagat) and new products, including Google Flights and Google Hotel Finder.

“There’s still a large percentage of travelers who haven’t heard of Kayak,” said Norm Rose, president of Travel Tech Consulting Inc. “Brand recognition is a challenge that they constantly face.”

Integrating TripAdvisor’s 60 million reviews may be a powerful tool in that regard. Consider a recent search for the EPIC Hotel in Miami. Pre-integration, Kayak had all of 10 reviews; TripAdvisor, 928.

That kind of volume carries a lot of weight, says Ryan Williams, director of client services, travel, for Compete, a “digital intelligence” company. “If TripAdvisor can help consumers trust [Kayak’s] content, then why wouldn’t they use it?” he said. “It’s just one more reason to use Kayak as your search engine.”

Of course, it should come as no surprise that Google is also incorporating reviews into Hotel Finder, although on a much smaller scale. Previously aggregating reviews from across the web — including those from TripAdvisor until they were pulled last summer — the site now only includes reviews from users with Google accounts. (There are currently 16 such reviews for the EPIC Hotel.)

“Reviews are also part of what Google is about now so there’ll be a natural competition there,” said Rose.

“It’s a fight over the online travel pie, which is only growing very slowly,” said Williams. “It might take two or three big, known brands to work together to change the landscape, improve the experience and actually grow the pie.”

Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.

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Not sure where to turn or who to trust when it comes to online travel reviews? Brace yourself. On Tuesday, shareholders of Expedia.com approved the company’s spinoff of TripAdvisor.com, setting the stage for what could be the next era in online travel advice.

The transition, which is expected be completed by the end of the year, won’t directly affect the user experience on TripAdvisor. Rather, it’s a recognition of the fact that the two companies operate under very different business models — Expedia’s business is built on transactions; TripAdvisor’s on advertising — and that separating the two will benefit both.

As Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts earlier this year, “We believe that moving ahead as two separate companies will allow each to stand on its own, drive it's own growth in technology, vision and culture, and ultimately, create far more value for our shareholders.”

“It’s an opportune time to do it,” Carroll Rheem, director of research at PhoCusWright, told msnbc.com. “TripAdvisor is ready for its next phase of evolution.”

The site has more than 50 million reviews, 44 million unique monthly visits and $485 million in revenue in 2010, according to a recent investors’ presentation.

Even so, a host of startups have launched recently under the premise that TripAdvisor’s model — millions of reviews from anonymous strangers — is outdated in these socially networked times. Instead of listening to strangers, they say, why not turn to your existing social networks on sites such as Facebook or Foursquare and get advice from people you already know and trust?

“Traditional [user-review] sites tend to mash everyone together,” said Travis Katz, co-founder and CEO of Gogobot.com, one of many sites built on the concept of friendsourcing. “The idea is to help you get trusted and personal advice by tapping into your friends and people like you.”

But friendsourcing also has its pitfalls, said Rheem. “Unless you have the most well-traveled friends in the world, they probably haven’t stayed in every hotel you’re considering or visited every destination you’re interested in,” she said.

Instead, look for more sites to opt for a combination of crowdsourcing, friendsourcing and whatever other sourcing they can access. Last year, for example, TripAdvisor launched Trip Friends, which augments the site’s anonymous reviews with insights from users’ Facebook friends. And Gogobot, which recently received $15 million in new funding, is working on creating a “recommendation engine” that will utilize multiple sources to create what Katz likens to a Pandora for travel.

“Friendsourcing is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Ryan Williams, director of client services, travel, for Compete.com, a marketing research company. “A lot of sites will start to leverage the power of your friends’ friends; if each of them has 500 friends, that’s a lot of people to tap into.

“If a review site can tap into that, they’ll do well.”

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Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.